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1646221354
| 9781646221356
| B0C1B7YQKD
| 3.75
| 273
| Jan 02, 2024
| Jan 02, 2024
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really liked it
| …deer…occupy a middle zone between …extremes of domestication and wildness. Far from tame, they are nonetheless experts at living with people, and …deer…occupy a middle zone between …extremes of domestication and wildness. Far from tame, they are nonetheless experts at living with people, and in many ways, they actually prefer to share habitat with us. All across North America, as in many other parts of the world, we exist in intimate proximity to deer.-------------------------------------- The FAA considers white-tailed deer more hazardous to U.S. civil aircraft than any other animal.Many images might pop to mind when we think about deer. I am sorry to say that the first one in my tiny mind is the sad vision of road kill. The second is the sheer joy of spotting wild deer in woods, or yards, or, more grandly, in national parks, whether the white-tail native to my part of the world, the mule deer and caribou more prevalent in the west, and even moose. I cannot say I have seen reindeer in the wild, unfortunately. Many visits to the Bronx Zoo introduced me to a much wider range of cervids, the family to which deer belong, including the diminutive muntjacs. [image] Erika Howsare - image from her site Erika Howsare has had more of a connection to deer than, I expect, most of us. She grew up in western Pennsylvania in a family that hunted. In fact, the Monday after Thanksgiving is an unofficial holiday in our state, with most schools, and many businesses closed due to expected high absenteeism. This is one of many foci of interaction between deer and people. I’d had an inkling, even before writing the book proposal, that deer were involved in all manner of controversies, contradictions, and human strivings. That was what got me interested in them. But I didn’t know too many specifics. When I started researching, one of the first things I did was to set up news alerts on deer and several other related terms.Thankfully, Howsare, a published poet, offers a lot more than the daily deer chyron. I did start the book from a fairly cerebral place where I thought, “Oh yeah, great subject. Like, this will bring up all kinds of great questions, and I’ll be able to go down all these roads in terms of the research and make these points, and it’s gonna be a really great opportunity to dig into these intellectual questions.”And a wondrous opportunity it proved. You will learn a lot about the human/deer connection, and a bit about deer behavior as well. [image] White tailed deer - image from PennVet – University of Pennsylvania One thing to consider is just how long deer and humans have been interacting. Pretty much as long as there have been people, judging by the content of ancient cave art. They appear in all cultures, and are a rich presence in mythology worldwide. As our first-hand experience of deer is usually liminal, many have come to see deer as ambassadors of the wild world, crossing from theirs to ours, and maybe offering a route away from the world of living humans. Of course, for many of us there is an UR deer image that has been burned into our brains. Really, can you name any other deer this side of Santa’s team? [image] Bambi - image from Disney via KRCA.com They are beautiful and offer us an image of wildland innocence. But for many they have become pestiferous. Consider having spent months planting and tending your beautiful back yard garden, only to wake one day to find that real-life Bambis and their kin have laid waste to all your work. There is also the carnage caused not just to deer but to people and their vehicles from collisions with deer. There are folks whose job it is to collect the bodies. Howsare spent time with one of them. Deer have been a crucial source of food for people across the millennia, but also of a wide range of materials. Howsare gets trained in earth skills to find out how to make buckskin, and many other useful items formed from deer parts. We usually think of reintroduction of wildlife having to do with trout, or other finned creatures. You may have heard of attempts to reintroduce predators, like wolves in Yellowstone. But the largest and most successful reintroduction in US history occurred in the early 20th century when deer, which had been driven near to extinction, were reintroduced in many parts of the nation. [image] Sweet Tooth - image from Netflix via BBC Ok, this was not at all included in the book but I kinda hoped it would gain at least a mention, as it does speak to the closeness of our species. Factlets abound. Did you know that deer can suffer from a chronic, deadly disease that we usually associate with cattle, chronic wasting disease? Or that maybe the notion of adorning rulers with crowns was a way of imitating the stag rack? You will gain an appreciation for the use of deer-based imagery in the film Get Out. There are plenty more. One of the main points to be gained is seeing how deer are actually quite adaptable, and have managed to carve out an ecological niche at the perimeters of human population. [image] Moose - image rom Britannica A survey course on cervid-sapiens connection makes for an entertaining, informative read on its own. But Howsare incorporates a personal journey into her narrative. Never a hunter, at least not one who shoots anything, she has enough personal connection to folks who do, relations, to want to gain a better understanding of the hunting culture and the rationales of those who kill deer. She looks at her own feelings about deer and hunting. Not all who hunt actually shoot. Hunting can be a group activity, with a diversity of roles, very reminiscent of our prehistoric ancestors. One very appealing element of this learning curve for Howsare was becoming more comfortable with being still, settling into a place and letting herself experience the environment, the moment, fully, a form of meditation almost. She looks at some of the outrages associate with hunting as well. Like releasing or breeding deer in fenced areas to be killed by people fond of killing things, but not much interested in doing all the research and preparation that serious hunters undertake. Think Dick Cheney hunting quail. My only gripe about the book is a petty one. I find that science/nature books always go down easier when the information is spiced with a bit of humor. No danger of that here. So, past my personal preferences, The Age of Deer is an easy thumbs up. You will learn a lot and gain a far greater understanding of the relationship between humans and cervids throughout history and our interactions today, finding yourself saying, whether aloud or internally, “I never knew that.” In the Anthropocene, it seems that far too much of humanity has assumed the position of the prototypical you-know-what frozen in place as the headlights of global doom approach at increasing speed. Deer, at least, have an excuse for such behavior, as their woodland-creature-instinct, however misguided it might be on a paved road, is to become very still so an approaching predator might not see or hear them. Given their abundance on the planet, it is a strategy that has worked out well for them, despite the roadside carnage, as deer remain the last large wild animal in most places. The roaches and rats will not be alone after we are gone. Deer, icons of woodland beauty, are adaptable. They are survivors, and will be keeping them company. If the American project was, in part, to make a pastoral landscape out of a wilderness, deer benefited from that project in a cultural sleight of hand. We thought of them as part of the wild, but we had misconceived them. Their secret was that they, like us—like squirrels, corn, apple trees, clover, ands sparrows—would flourish in our human garden. Review posted - 03/22/24 Publication date – 01/20/24 I received a hardcover of The Age of Deer from Catapult in return for a fair review. Thanks, folks. [image] [image] [image] [image] [image] [image] This review will soon be cross-posted on my site, Coot’s Reviews. Stop by and say Hi! =============================EXTRA STUFF Links to the author’s personal, FB, Instagram, and Twitter pages Profile – from Catapult ERIKA HOWSARE holds an MFA in literary arts from Brown University and has published two books of poetry. She also worked in local journalism for twenty years, covering culture and environmental issues. She teaches writing and contributes reviews and essays to various national outlets. A native of Pennsylvania, she lives in rural Virginia. Interviews -----Poets & Writers - Ten Questions for Erika Howsare by staff -----Flyleaf Books - Erika Howsare presents THE AGE OF DEER -Howsare reads from the book then takes questions – the sound quality is poor -----Phoebe Journal - Hungry Deer and Pissed off Gardeners: An Interview with Erika Howsare by Ashlen Renner Items of Interest from the author -----The Atlantic - An Incurable Disease Is Coming for Deer - an excerpt - but requires a subscription -----Orion - Skin to Skin with a Deer - excerpt -----Virginia Audio Collective - If You See a Deer - a four-episode companion podcast -----Lithub - Erika Howsare on Finding Inspiration in Headlines Items of Interest -----Be vewy, vewy quiet. - Mister Fudd may be hunting a different species, but his approach applies to deer as well My review of Stephen Graham Jones’s - The Only Good Indian - a wronged elk on the warpath -----My review of Elizabeth Marshall Thomas’s - The Hidden Life of Deer: Lessons from the Natural World -----Gutenberg - The Yearling by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings ...more |
Notes are private!
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not set
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Mar 18, 2024
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Mar 20, 2024
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Hardcover
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1948226391
| 9781948226394
| B0BT91B76L
| 3.62
| 215
| unknown
| Oct 17, 2023
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it was amazing
| What makes a person the same person over time? Is it our consciousness, the what-it’s-like to be us? Is consciousness like a light that’s either on What makes a person the same person over time? Is it our consciousness, the what-it’s-like to be us? Is consciousness like a light that’s either on or off?-------------------------------------- What remains of a person once they’ve died? It depends on what we choose to keep.Amy Kurzweil is a long-time cartoonist for The New Yorker. If the name sounds a bit familiar, but you aren’t a reader of that magazine, it may be because her father is Ray Kurzweil. He is a genius of wide renown. He invented a way for computers to process text in almost any font, a major advance in making optical character recognition (OCR) a useful, and ubiquitous tool. He also developed early electronic instruments. As a teenager he wrote software that wrote music in the style of classical greats. No gray cells left behind there. He happened to be very interested in Artificial Intelligence (AI). It helps to have a specific project in mind when trying to develop new applications and ideas. Ray had one. His father, Fred, had died when he was a young man. Ray wanted to make an AI father, a Fred ChatBot, or Fredbot, to regain at least some of the time he had never had with his dad. [image] Amy Kurzweil - Image from NPR - shot by Melissa Leshnov Fred was a concert pianist and conductor in Vienna in the 1920s and 1930s. A wealthy American woman was so impressed with him that she told him that if he ever wanted to come to the USA, she would help. The Nazification of Austria made the need to leave urgent in 1938, so Fred fled with his wife, Hannah. (He had actually been Fritz in Austria, becoming Fred in the states.) He eventually found work, teaching music. Artificial: A Love Story is a physically hefty art book, a tale told in drawings and text. Amy traces in pictures her father’s effort to reconstruct as much of his father’s patterns as possible. To aid in the effort there was a storage facility with vast amounts of material from his life both in Austria and in America. She joins into the enterprise of transcribing much of the handwritten material, then reading it into recordings which are used to teach/train the AI software. It is a years-long process, which is fascinating in its own right. She also draws copies of many of the documents she finds for use in the book. [image] Ray Kurzweil with a portrait of his father - image from The NPR interview - Shot by Melisssa Leshnov But there is much more going on in this book than interesting, personalized tech. First, there is the element of historical preservation. I always understood my father’s desire to resurrect his father’s identity as being connected to two different kinds of trauma. One is the loss of his father at a young age in a common but tragic scenario, with heart disease. The other trauma is this loss of a whole culture. Jewish life in Vienna was incredibly vibrant. Literally overnight it was lost. The suddenness of that loss was profound, and it took me a while to appreciate that. My great-aunt Dorit, who died this past year at 98, said they were following all the arbitrary protocols of the Nazis to save all this documentation. Saving documentation is an inheritance in my family that is a response to that traumatic circumstance. - from the PW interviewKurzweil looks at three generations of creativity, (Fritz was a top-tier musician. His wife, Hannah, was an artist. Ray was also a musician, but mostly a tech genius. Amy is a cartoonist and a writer.) using Ray’s Fredbot project as the central pillar around which to organize an ongoing discussion of concepts. In doing so, she offers up not merely the work of the project, but her personal experiences, showing clear commonalities between herself and her never-met grandfather. This makes for a very satisfying read. Are the similarities across generations, this stream of creativity, the impact not just of DNA, but of lived experience? Nature or nurture, maybe the realization of potential brought to flower by the influence of environment whether external (living in a place that values what one has to offer) or internal (families nurturing favored traits)? [image] Image from the book - posted on The American Academy in Berlin site One could ask, “what makes us what are?” The book opens with a conversation about the meaning of life. But life is surely less determinative, less hard-edge defined than that. A better question might be what were the historical factors and personal choices that contributed to the evolution of who we have become? [image] Image from the book - it was posted in the NPR interview Existential questions abound, which makes this a brain-candy read of the first order. Kurzweil looks at issues around AI consciousness. Can artificial consciousness approach humanity without a body? What if we give an AI a body, with sensations? Ray thinks that we are mostly comprised of patterns. What if those patterns could be preserved, maybe popped into a new carrier. It definitely gets us into Battlestar Galactica territory. How would people be any different from Cylons then? Is there really a difference? Would that signal eternal life? Would we be gods to our creations? If we make an AI consciousness will it be to know, love, and serve us? The rest of that catechistic dictat adds that it is also to be happy with him in heaven forever. I am not so certain we want our AIs remaining with us throughout eternity. As with beloved pets, sometimes we need a break. Are we robots for God? Ray thinks such endless replication is possible, BTW. Kurzweil uses the image of Pinocchio throughout to illustrate questions of personhood, with wanting to live, then wanting to live forever. [image] Every Battlestar Cylon model explained - image from ScreenRant Persistence of self is a thread here. As noted in the introductory quotes, Kurzweil thinks about whether a person is the same person before and after going through some change. How much change is needed before it crosses some line? Am I the same person I was before I read this book? My skin and bones are older. But they are the same skin and bones. However, I have new thoughts in my head. Does having different thoughts change who I fundamentally am? Where does learning leave off and transition take over? Where does that self go when we die? Can it be reconstructed, if only as a simulacrum? How about experiences? Once experienced, where do those experiences go? These sorts of mental gymnastics are certainly not everyone’s cuppa, but I found this element extremely stimulating. Kurzweil remains grounded in her personal experience, feelings, and concerns. The book has intellectual and philosophical heft, and concerns itself with far-end technological concerns, but it remains, at heart, a very human story. As one might expect from an established cartoon artist who has generated more smiles than the Joker’s makeup artist, there are plenty of moments of levity here. Artificial is not a yuck-fest, but a serious story with some comic relief. It is a book that will make you laugh, smile, and feel for the people depicted in its pages. Amy Kurzweil has written a powerful, smart, thought-provoking family tale. There is nothing artificial about that. I used to wonder if I could wake up into a different self. For all I knew, it could have happened every morning. A new self would have a new set of memories.Review posted - 01/12/23 Publication date – 10/17/23 I received a hard copy of Artificial: A Love Story from Catapult in return for a fair review. [image] [image] [image] [image] [image] [image] This review is cross-posted on my site, Coot’s Reviews. Stop by and say Hi! =============================EXTRA STUFF Links to the author’s personal, FB, Instagram, and Twitter pages Profile – from Catapult AMY KURZWEIL is a New Yorker cartoonist and the author of Flying Couch: A Graphic Memoir. She was a 2021 Berlin Prize Fellow with the American Academy in Berlin, a 2019 Shearing Fellow with the Black Mountain Institute, and has received fellowships from MacDowell, Djerassi, and elsewhere.Interviews -----NPR - Using AI, cartoonist Amy Kurzweil connects with deceased grandfather in 'Artificial' by Chloe Veltman -----Publishers Weekly - Reincarnation: PW Talks with Amy Kurzweil by Cheryl Klein -----PC Magazine - How Ray Kurzweil and His Daughter Brought A Relative Back From The Dead By Emily Dreibelbis ——LitHub - Amy Kurzweil on the Open Questions of the Future by Christopher Hermelin Songs/Music -----The Jefferson Airplane - White Rabbit- referenced in Chapter 6 Items of Interest from the author -----Artificial: A Love Story promo vid -----The New Yorker - excerpt -----New Yorker - A List of Amy Kurzweil’s pieces for the magazine Items of Interest -----Ray Kurzweil on I’ve got a Secret -----A trailer for Transcendant Man, a documentary about Ray Kurzweil -----WeBlogTheWorld - Amy interviews Ray in a Fireside Chat at NASA – sound is poor. You will need to ramp up the volume to hear – video – 23:07 -----Wiki on Battlestar Galactica ...more |
Notes are private!
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not set
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Jan 08, 2024
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Jan 11, 2024
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Hardcover
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1646220722
| 9781646220724
| 1646220722
| 3.47
| 627
| Mar 07, 2023
| Mar 07, 2023
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it was amazing
| ”Who ya gonna believe, me or your own eyes?” - Chico Marx in Duck Soup-------------------------------------- The truth isn’t enough. Most people are ”Who ya gonna believe, me or your own eyes?” - Chico Marx in Duck Soup-------------------------------------- The truth isn’t enough. Most people aren’t even listening for it.Agent Mulder knew that the truth was out there. But what can one do about those who are incapable or unwilling to see it, or worse, those who have a vested interest in disbelief? And how much responsibility to persuade the unpersuadable must be carried by those whose truth is in question? Aliens do figure large in this book, but not in the Mulder/Scully mode. [image] Dina Nayeri - image from LitHub Dina Nayeri has been writing about the truth since at least 2012, with a particular emphasis on immigrant issues, more specifically, on refugees, asylum seekers. Her previous book, The Waiting Place, released in 2022, documented life in Katsikas, a Greek refugee camp, mixing tales from the lives of some of the children there with her own experiences as a refugee from Iran. In The Ungrateful Refugee, 2019, she writes of adult refugees she has met, looking at what being a refugee is like for them. She has also written novels and short fiction, centered on the refugee experience. And that is her primary focus here as well. The aim of that book [The Ungrateful Refugee] was to really look back on my own experience, and what people go through now to make some sense of the modern displacement experience. One of the sections of the book is about asylum storytelling, and I had so many stories of people getting disbelieved for the stupidest reasons, and the way that the asylum officers listen to the stories. It was very shocking. I wanted to write a lot more about that and, with this book, I wanted to expand that out to just how the vulnerable are listened to, versus people who are very privileged. - from the Ms Magazine interviewIn Who Gets Believed, Nayeri takes on a broader perspective. She looks at the challenges people face in trying to get their truths believed not only in refugee situations but in many other walks of life. There are two factual threads that bind the book together, weaving in and out over the course of three hundred or so pages. First is the tale of K, a Tamil torture victim whose evidence includes a back full of scars. Somehow the system tries to persuade itself that K did that to himself in order to gain entry to the UK. If this sounds Kafkaesque to you, it does to Nayeri, as well. She frequently cites that patron saint of bureaucratic horror as she takes us through the nightmare world of mindlessness, and barely disguised racism, sexism, and xenophobia that is the West’s immigration system. It makes a powerful metaphor for how the system treats those whose rights are supposedly guaranteed by international treaty, but who are more typically treated as rightless, and suspect supplicants. For most migrants [asylum attorney Maleha Haq] explained, credibility isn’t the reason for rejection. In fact, the issue of credibility is cleverly avoided by using the claimant’s own lack of knowledge about the definition of a word. What is a refugee? Before he is believed, an asylum seeker must choose the right story out of many, the relevant part of a complicated life. It’s like being asked to cut a circular disk from a cylinder. You have many stacked circles, but if you cut at the wrong angle, you have an oval. You’ve failed to present the desired thing.Another thread is her brother-in-law, someone with a lifetime of mental health issues. Making the credibility tale personal, she writes about not believing he was really incapable of providing for himself in the world, seeing him as a leech on his family, a con-artist working the system. This is a powerful approach, bringing in real-world issues, but with names and faces, and humanizing the core questions even more by weaving in how disbelief, even her own, has impacted her life. One of the many strengths of the book is Nayeri’s commentary on communication. She tells how language is used as a tool of obfuscation and exclusion. Refugees must learn the nuances of the immigration system in order to gain entrance. They must learn to play the game, memorize the exact right words to use, be ready to offer the right presentation. The unpolished truth is typically fraught with openings that officials, whose default is rejection, (UK Home Office workers are given target numbers for rejecting asylum seekers.) can seize on to deny asylum. It is disheartening to learn that the prospects of a refugee gaining asylum correspond very closely with whether they have legal counsel or not, which bodes ill for most. Again Nayeri offers a personal element, reporting on her experiences with having to learn not just what, but how to present, in order to get what she wanted, whether acceptance to a college of her choice, or a job, post college. Despite all the talk of leadership and change-making, what you actually learn at Harvard Business School is how to be believed—how to be the ones people want to believe, feel safe believing, given their heuristic shortcuts.The cost to refugees is clearly higher but the parallels in how one must approach large systems with language resonates like Big Ben at the top of the hour. …belonging is a performance with a scriptNayeri looks as well at a bit of the world of medicine. She notes that many caregivers disparage sufferers of Sickle Cell Disease, who must repeatedly seek help with pain issues, as “Sicklers,” refusing to take seriously the very real pain experienced by those afflicted. And she notes caregiver disparagement of different ways of grieving in different cultures. She has a tale of her own about her doctors refusing to treat her the way she wanted, as a reflection of how many doctors do not take seriously the wishes and pain reports of many women patients. This one resonated personally. In late 2021, my own sister experienced this, as, for months, she had complained of pain, but was sent home from each medical visit (when she could even get one. Sometimes this entailed months of waiting.) with little or no relief, and no real examination, certainly no effective one, of underlying causation. After all, she was just an old lady, and old people have pain all the time. No big whoop. The pain finally became too much and she was rushed to the ER. Subsequent surgery revealed a return of a stomach cancer after a ten-year-remission, nicely metastasized. She was dead within weeks. The risk entailed in medical professionals ignoring claims of pain is very real. She takes on The Reid Technique, a widely used interrogation regimen routinely abused by police, with a chargeable outcome being a much higher priority than truth-seeking. She looks at how the methodology is used to generate inconsistencies, which are then portrayed as evidence of dishonesty. The obverse of this is firefighters being granted exceptional credibility when testifying as expert witnesses, despite there sometimes being little scientific merit to what is claimed on the stand. The Reid Technique begins with an assumption of guilt. It was originally intended to be used only when the interrogator is absolutely certain of guilt. Even then, it was intended not to extract a confession that might condemn the suspect on its own (the technique is, after all, so torturous that even its creators didn’t believe it would cause an innocent person to confess, they seemed aware of that risk), but to uncover new, unknown details—intimate ones about the why and the how—that could then be corroborated. It was that supporting physical evidence that would convict the guilty—a body, a weapon, some real proof.It might be easy to intone a general rule of Trust No One, but refugees do not have that luxury. Unless an asylum-seeker can somehow get legal representation, they are forced to trust people who are in a position to help or harm their cases. There is plenty more in here, dives on how we persuade ourselves to believe thing that are not true, how politics creates truths, even alters our bodies, on how we only see what we are looking for, how having stories told publicly makes them more real, how consultants befuddle their clients. You will learn a lot. You will also feel a lot. Nayeri’s stories are moving, upsetting, and hopefully, motivating. They will force you to think, and, hopefully, engage in some introspection. Her willingness to own her own biases shows that she is not looking for justice solely in the world outside, but within herself. Red Smith famously said that writing was easy, All you do is sit down at a typewriter, cut open a vein, and bleed. I imagine there was a lot of cleaning up necessary in Nayeri’s writing places while she worked on this book. Also, she is not trying to get you to like her. This is an honest portrayal of a complicated person, one who struggled trying to fit in with American society as a child, and who maneuvered the ivy halls of Harvard and Princeton, and a premier spot in the consultoverse, in her drive for success. Who Gets Believed is a powerful look not just at the terrifying refugee experience, but at the wider problems of disbelief that are grounded in biased or unsupported notions. I Want To Believe that the issues raised in this book are being addressed, but while I expect that there are awareness programs being run by some healthcare provider institutions, I seriously doubt there is anything being done by police departments to cope with abuse of the Reid Technique. And I would bet that immigration services, swamped as they are with applicants, and chronically understaffed, are unlikely to have done much about basing asylum denials on firmer reasons than what appears the case today. The truth of what is happening in these parts of our world is definitely out there. Dina Nayeri has brought some of that truth to the rest of us. Belief is only needed if there is no proof. Nayeri offers evidence. These are truths you need to know. this variability in judicial standards is one of the greatest flaws of the American asylum system. Why should the weight of any kind of evidence vary by judge? Should one’s fate depend on the compassion or politics of the judge assigned? Should it vary by administration?...asylum grant rates go up and down based on who the attorney general is. That’s not just at the judge level but at the screening stage. The number of people found to have credible fear and entitled to be seen by a judge depends on political pressure. Review posted - 06/02/23 Publication dates ----------Hardcover – 03/07/23 ----------Trade paperback - 03/5/24 I received a copy of Who Gets Believed? from Catapult in return for a fair review. [image] [image] [image] [image] [image] [image] This review is cross-posted on my site, Coot’s Reviews. Stop by and say Hi! =============================EXTRA STUFF Profile - from Wikipedia Nayeri was born in Isfahan, Iran. Her mother was a doctor and her father a dentist. She spent the first 8 years of her life in Isfahan but fled Iran with her mother and brother Daniel in 1988 because her mother had converted to Christianity and the moral police of the Islamic Republic had threatened her with execution.[1]Nayeri, her mother and brother spent two years in Dubai and Rome as asylum seekers and eventually settled in Oklahoma, in the United States.[2] Her father remained in Iran, where he still lives. She has written several works of non-fiction, novels for adult and children, and numerous articles. Links to the Nayeri’s personal, FB, Instagram, and Twitter pages Interviews -----NPR - Dina Nayeri wants you to question 'Who Gets Believed' | Book of the Day - with Juana summers – audio - 8:44 -----Ms Magazine - Telling the ‘Right’ Story: Dina Nayeri on Refugee Credibility - by Jera Brown -----LitHub - Manufacturing Lies: DinaNayeri on How Our Cultural and Bureaucratic Norms Often Betray the Truth with Whitney Terrell and V.V. Ganeshananthan Songs/Music -----Weeknd - High for This- mentioned in Chapter 5 Items of Interest from the author -----PBS - Is the distinction between migrant and refugee meaningful? - Video – 3:02 -----Muck Rack - Articles by Dina Nayeri - links to pieces in diverse publications Items of Interest -----NY Times - Many Women Have an Intense Fear of Childbirth, Survey Suggests by Roni Caryn Rabin -----AP - Why do so many Black women die in pregnancy? One reason: Doctors don't take them seriously by Kat Stafford -----Wisconsin Criminal Defense - Understanding the Reid Technique in Police Interrogations - The Law Offices of Christopher J. Cherella -----Project Gutenberg - The Trial by Franz Kafka – full text for free ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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May 08, 2023
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May 22, 2023
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May 23, 2023
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Hardcover
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1640093982
| 9781640093980
| 1640093982
| 4.36
| 99
| unknown
| Nov 15, 2022
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really liked it
| …it feels today that we are in the middle of a profound transformation of humanity.-------------------------------------- We don’t live in a cos …it feels today that we are in the middle of a profound transformation of humanity.-------------------------------------- We don’t live in a cosmos. We live in a cosmogenesis, a universe that is becoming, a universe that established its order in each era and then transcends that order to establish a new order.Cosmos - The universe seen as a well-ordered whole; from the Greek word kosmos ‘order, ornament, world, or universe’, so called by Pythagoras or his disciples from their view of its perfect order and arrangement. – from Oxford reference Genesis - Hebrew Bereshit (“In the Beginning”), the first book of the Bible. Its name derives from the opening words: “In the beginning….” Genesis narrates the primeval history of the world - from the Encyclopedia Britannica [image] Brian Thomas Swimme - image from Journey of the Universe So, Cosmogenesis means, at its root, the beginning of everything. Diverse cultures have come up with diverse understandings of how everything came to be. Where Swimme differs is in seeing the genesis, the beginning, the creation of everything as an ongoing process, not a one-off in deep history. Cosmogenesis tracks Swimme’s journey from math professor to spokesman for a movement that seeks to rejoin science and spirituality. The stations along this route, which runs from 1968 to 1983, consist of people he considers great minds. He gushes like a Swiftie with closeup tickets to an Eras Tour show over several of these genius-level individuals, while relying on his analytical capacity to note shortcomings in some of the theories some others propose. Swimme mixes his approach a bit. It is in large measure a memoir, with a focus on his intellectual (and spiritual) growth, along with descripti0ns of the places where he lived, taught, and studied, and the people who inspired him, providing some background to the theories and ovbservations to which he is exposed. A mathematics PhD, with a long and diverse teaching history, he grounds his work in the scientific. But he does not separate the scientific from the spiritual, from the human. In his view, we are all a part of the ongoing evolution of everything, noting that every subatomic part that make up every atom in our bodies, in our world, was present at the Biggest Bang, then was further refined by the lesser bangs of supernovas manufacturing what became our constituent parts. Even today, we bathe, wallow, bask, and breathe in radiation from that original event. It may have occurred fourteen billion years ago, but in a measurable way it is happening still. And we all remain a part of it. There is a piece of Swimme’s material-cum-spiritual notion that I found very appealing. I have experienced an ecstatic state while perceiving beauty in the world. On telling my son about one such, I remarked that it was like a religious experience. He answered, “why like?” Swimme recruits like experiences to bolster the connection between the humanly internal and the eternal of the cosmos. Bear in mind that Swimme grew up in a Catholic tradition, which clearly impressed him. There is a strong incense scent of religiosity to his work. Not saying that Cosmogenesis is a religion, but I am not entirely certain it is not. As a child I had learned that the Mass was where the sacred lived.I had a very different response to the religious world to which I was exposed as a child through twelve years of Catholic education. There was no connection for me between the Mass and the sacred, whatever that was. Mass represented mostly a burden, a mandatory exercise, communicating nothing about layers of experience beyond the material, while offering hard evidence of the power of institutions to control how I spent my time. I did not, at the time, understand the community building and reinforcing aspect to this weekly tribal ritual, separate from the religious content. I believe that what we think of as spiritual or spectral is the reality that lies beyond our perceptual bandwidth. The ancients did not understand lightning, so imagined a god hurling bolts. With scientific understanding of lightning, Zeus is cast from an imagined home on Mount Olympus to the confines of cultural history. Science expands our effective, if not necessarily our physical, biological bandwidth, and thus captures, making understandable, realities once thought the domain of imagined gods. But what of feeling? The ecstatic state I experience when witnessing the beauty of the world, is that a purely biological state, comprised of hormones and DNA? Or do we assign to that feeling, which can be difficult to explain, a higher meaning because of our inability to define it precisely enough? And, in doing so, are we not following in the path of the ancient Greeks who assigned to extra-human beings responsibility for natural events? So, I am not sure I am buying in to Swimme’s views. It is, though, something, to pique the interest of people like myself who have rejected most forms of organized religion, particularly those that focus on a human-like all-powerful being, (see George Carlin’s routine re this. I’m with George.) but who hold open a lane for a greater, a different understanding of all reality. Where is the line between the material and the spiritual? How did we come to be here? Evolution provides plenty to explain that. But we still get back to a linear understanding of time as an impasse. If the (our) universe began with the big bang, then what came before? Einstein showed with his special theory of relativity that time is not so fixed a concept as we’d thought. Things operate at different speeds, relative to each other, depending on distance and speed. Who is to say that there might not be more fungability to our understanding of time, maybe even radically so? In a way, this is what Swimme is on about, ways of looking at our broader reality, at our origins and ongoing evolution, (not just the evolution of our species, but of the universe itself) through other, more experiential perspectives, (a new Gnosticism?) while still including science. Humans have expressed their faith in a great variety of symbols, many of which have inspired me at one time or another. But today, if you ask for the foundation of my faith, I would say the stone cliffs of the Hudson River Palisades.Overall I found this book brain candy of the first order. Take it as a survey-course primer for the theory he propounds. There are many videos available on-line for those interested in going beyond Cosmo 101. So, Is cosmogenesis one of the ten greatest ideas in human history as is claimed here? That is above my pay grade. Some of the notions presented here seemed a bit much, but there was enough that was worth considering that made this a satisfying, intriguing read. Suffice it to say that it is a fascinating take on, well, everything, and can be counted on to give your gray cells, comprised of materials that have been around for 14 billion years, a hearty jiggle at the very least. Everything is up in the air. We are living in a deranged world where nihilism dominates every major state. The contest today is for the next world philosophy. Review posted – January 13, 2023 Publication dates ----------Hardcover - November 15, 2022 ----------Trade paperback - December 12, 2023 I received a hardcover of Cosmogenesis from Counterpoint in return for a fair review. [image] [image] [image] [image] This review has been cross-posted on my site, Coot’s Reviews. Stop by and say Hi! =============================EXTRA STUFF Links to the author’s personal, FB, and Twitter pages Twitter and Facebook do not appear to have ever been used you might also try Interviews -----Deeptime Network - Brian Swimme -- What's Next? Planetary Mind and the Future - video – 1:12:41 – from 6:50 -----Sue Speaks - SUE Speaks Podcast: Searching for Unity in Everything - podcast - 31:27 Items of Interest from the author ----- The Third Story of the Universe -----A Great Leap in Being - 28:56 -----Human Energy - Introduction to the Noosphere: The Planetary Minds -----Journey of the Universe Items of Interest -----San Francisco Chronicle - Science doesn’t cover it all, author Brian Thomas Swimme explains ----- George Carlin on religion ...more |
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Jan 08, 2023
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Jan 10, 2023
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B07V9BP1SF
| 4.12
| 7,353
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it was amazing
| Years and years ago, when I was a boy, when there were wolves in Wales, and birds the color of red-flannel petticoats whisked past the harp-shaped Years and years ago, when I was a boy, when there were wolves in Wales, and birds the color of red-flannel petticoats whisked past the harp-shaped hills, when we sang and wallowed all night and day in caves that smelt like Sunday afternoons in damp front farmhouse parlors, and we chased, with the jawbones of deacons, the English and the bears, before the motor car, before the wheel, before the duchess-faced horse, when we rode the daft and happy hills bareback, it snowed and it snowed. But here a small boy says: "It snowed last year, too. I made a snowman and my brother knocked it down and I knocked my brother down and then we had tea. [image] Cover of the original publication - image from Goodreads It began in 1945 as a radio talk, Memories of Christmas, for the Welsh Children’s Hour program. He later merged bits from a 1947 piece called Conversation About Christmas and sold it to Harper’s Bazaar in 1950 as A Child’s Memories of Christmas in Wales. In 1952, Caedmon Records asked him to record himself reading it for the B-side of a collection of his poems. The title we have come to know for the piece, A Child’s Christmas in Wales, was from this recording. Thomas had been unable to remember the title used in the Harper’s magazine version, so recalled as best he could. It turned into kind of a big deal, as the recording is seen as seminal in starting the audiobook industry in the USA. [image] Dylan Thomas in the White Horse Tavern - image from Peter Harrington – The Journal – photo by Bunny Adler Set in Swansea in the 1920s, Thomas offers a fragmented memory, recalling not just one particular Christmas but his childhood Christmases in general. One Christmas was so much like the other, in those years around the sea-town corner now, out of all sound except the distant speaking of the voices I sometimes hear a moment before sleep, that I can never remember whether it snowed for six days and six nights when I was twelve, or whether it snowed for twelve days and twelve nights when I was six.It is a mix of his perspective as a child and his finer focus, looking back as an adult. The particular Christmas that stands out includes images of a neighbor’s house catching fire The overall timbre is warm and loving. But there are hints as well of darker elements in the world around. Some bred from imagination the winds through the trees made noises as of old and unpleasant and maybe web footed men wheezing in caves… perhaps it was a ghost… perhaps it was trolls…Others from observation We returned home through the poor streets where only a few children fumbled with bare red fingers in the wheel-rutted snow and cat-called after us, their voices fading away, as we trudged uphill…I would scour the swatched town for the news of the little world, and find always a dead bird by the Post Office or by the white deserted swings; perhaps a robin, all but one of his fires out… Some few large men sat in the front parlors, without their collars, Uncles almost certainly, trying their new cigars, holding them out judiciously at arms' length, returning them to their mouths, coughing, then holding them out again as though waiting for the explosion; and some few small aunts, not wanted in the kitchen, nor anywhere else for that matter, sat on the very edge of their chairs, poised and brittle, afraid to break, like faded cups and saucers.There is also mention of chasing the English and bears in deep Welsh history, a reference to wars that ended with English subjugation of Wales. The story is about the sequence of events from one Christmas afternoon, when a neighbor’s calls of “Fire” draw the fire brigade and all breathing neighbors, the narrator and his co-conspirators addressing the possible conflagration with the launching of multiple snowballs. It offers a portrait of youthful shenanigans, and homes filled with boisterous “uncles” and tippling, excluded “aunts.” Gleeful image-making permeates "Our snow was not only shaken from white wash buckets down the sky, it came shawling out of the ground and swam and drifted out of the arms and hands and bodies of the trees; snow grew overnight on the roofs of the houses like a pure and grandfather moss, minutely ivied the walls and settled on the postman, opening the gate, like a dumb, numb thunder-storm of white, torn Christmas cards."The boys imagine themselves as Eskimo-footed Arctic marksmen, snow-blind travelers on north hills, see their large boots as leaving hippo prints, and approach a maybe-haunted house with carols. It is a tale about memory itself as much as about Thomas’s recollections of childhood, as individual experiences, although some are specifically recalled, merge into sometimes single, catch-all recollection. Please do listen to Thomas’s reading, a poet’s reading of prose, elevating his story to a form somewhere between literature and song. A smile sprung forth on my face on hearing this (yes, I have heard it more than a couple of times before. The smile returns every time.) and lasted well beyond the delivery of the final sentence. It would, on occasion, pull upwards, straining my cheeks and gums, before settling back a little in preparation for the next assault. The scenes he recalls, and his snarky commentary, will make you smile, probably in recognition of the sort, if not the specifics, maybe even laugh out loud. It always gets a passel of LOLs from me. The language is celestial, as is his world-class talent for imagery and word-play. It will lift your spirit and make it hover for the duration of the reading, maybe even a while beyond. You could do worse than making the playing of this recitation a seasonal tradition. One thing this story is likely to do is to spark personal recollections of Christmases of our youth. I would love to hear about yours. Thomas’s recalled 1920s Christmases resonated with my memories of Christmases in the 1950s and 1960s Bronx. Mine were certainly not all snow-filled, but, as with Thomas’s recollections, they all occupy the well of memory with a fine dusting of white. Unlike Thomas, there is not a single Christmas that stands out from my childhood. Like his, mine have taken on a general character, merging into a common fuzzy-edged recollection. The space between Thanksgiving and the special morning was always filled with great excitement and anticipation. Going to see the Christmas displays at Macy’s, Saks, Lord & Taylor’s, and even more stores, became a tradition, as was visiting the massive tree at Rockefeller Center. I got to sit on Santa’s lap at Macy’s at least once, but had sense enough to be skeptical even as a sprout. Why would someone claiming to be Santa’s helper look and dress just like him? Something clearly did not add up. The hunt for presents hidden in closets, cupboards, and underneath anything that had an underneath was a seasonal sport. On Christmas Eve, my sisters (all three much older) would head out for midnight mass, fresh in finery, make-upped, seeming serious. I had no notion at the time that such a display might have been as much a mating ritual as an act of piety. I was spared that particular form of torture, (a Mass even longer and presumably more unendurable than the ones I was forced to attend every week) excused by my youth. Despite my concerted attempts to remain awake hoping to spot Santa, most years I was long asleep before they all arrived back home, cherry-cheeked, coats and hats asparkle as the dim light inside our front door was magnified by reflections from unmelted flakes. Christmas morning was a bubbling mass of excitement as we all gathered in the living room, and took turns opening gifts. There was always one for me, and for my brother labeled “From Santa,” supplemental to the gifts from our parents, and each other. As if we were not wired enough from a night of short sleep followed by a meth-level increase in respiration, Christmas breakfast tended to be French toast, slathered with Aunt Jemima’s, Log Cabin, or Vermont Maid. Attending Mass was mandatory, of course. It is a wonder the church did not crumble to the ground from all the child and pre-adolescent vibrations juddering the pews. We would always unwrap an annual gift, a fruit cake, from my father’s aunt, a mysterious figure I never actually met. In the years since I have come to think of Christmas as akin to the baseball season for us Mets fans. The lead up was all excitement, wondering what goodies might come our way, hoping for some surprises, and that some gift wishes might come true. The reality was rarely very satisfying, filled as it was with things like socks and pajamas. There were toys, of course, but usually of the Woolworth’s sort, things like cap pistols, and plastic trains that rolled uneasily around a circle of plastic rails. Occasionally, there would be something more interesting. A Davy Crockett coonskin cap was a memorable hit. It was my brother who actually got me some of the more exciting, larger-ticket items, a yellow, battery-operated bulldozer, a robot that shot missiles, a wireless walkie-talkie that was pretty cool for 1960. The day itself was always an opportunity for some of the neighborhood kids to try out brand new sleds. The Bronx may not have San Franciscan hills (although the West Bronx is particularly rich with steep slopes) but there were plenty of hills, snow, slush and ice-covered land to be challenged. Even if you did not get a new sled, there was certain to be a neighbor kid who had, and there was a chance he might let you take it for a ride. Of course, there were always cardboard boxes and trash can lids that offered a sliding descent if not a lot of control. Not that it ultimately made a lot of difference to me. It was while attempting to steer an actual sled down a Tremont Avenue sidewalk that my face made a dent in a stubbornly unmoving tree. Sadly, sledding was one of many skills I never managed to acquire. The tree in our tiny living room was real, in the early years, but as adolescence approached, and my parents ploughed further into middle age, it was supplanted by a disappointing plastic imitation. The toys were soon in pieces. The new PJ’s supplanted their high-water, short-sleeved predecessors. Winter settled in, and the disappointment of not getting what you really wanted faded. Dashed hope settled back underground, like a perennial, biding its time until the next season arrived for it to sprout forth once again, all shiny and new. When I had children of my own, I tried to install a few elements to make the day special. We had a tree of course. Watching It’s A Wonderful Life became a Christmas Eve tradition, and I read The Polar Express to them at bedtime. The girls would always find, on Christmas morning, a letter from Santa (typed, in an appropriate font, in red. My hideous penmanship would have been too obvious.) encouraging the sorts of feelings and behavior one might expect from a benign spirit. I made my own Christmas cards for many years, with their names included among the From list. But it was mostly something for me. My greatest parental Christmas triumph, however, was singular. The girls were on the verge of disbelieving. We had recently moved into a new place, a house that featured a beautiful, albeit no longer functional fireplace. I carved a linoleum cut of reindeer hoofs, and proceeded to make hoof prints leading from the fireplace into the living room and kitchen. The girls could not believe that any parent would willingly make such a huge mess, and THEY BOUGHT IT! [image] Cover of the original Caedmon recording The season has settled into another phase for us. ¥es, there is still a tree, although this year is likely to be the last of the real ones. There is my wife and our close immediate relations. The tree skirt is reliably populated with resting felines. My children are scattered so are not a presence, which is sad. I have long since ceased making my own cards, Goodreads review-writing having absorbed that artistic impulse. We still have a special meal, including some foods that only appear once a year. We still exchange gifts on Christmas day. And on Christmas eve I harangue my wife into tolerating yet another showing of It’s A Wonderful Life. I still end up in tears. I can only hope that my kids (all grown up now) have happy memories of the holiday, and that they have found some traditions to carry forward for their own (someday) children. Merry Christmas, Everyone! Review posted – December 4, 2022 Publication date – 1952, in this form, anyway. [image] [image] [image] [image] This review has been cross-posted on my site, Coot’s Reviews. Stop by and say Hi! =============================EXTRA STUFF Items of Interest -----Wiki on the history of the poem – very informative -----Faded Page - The full text in multiple formats -----Harper Audio on Soundcloud - Dylan Thomas’s reading - 25:07 – with an introduction by Billy Collins – worth checking out -----* Encyclopedia.com - A Child’s Christmas in Wales -----Vinyl Writers - Dylan Thomas’ Caedmon Readings: Childhood, Death, and the Welsh Wild Wonder For a bit of fun, you might check out my original holiday short story, The Short Goodbye ...more |
Notes are private!
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not set
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Nov 29, 2022
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Dec 01, 2022
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Kindle Edition
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1250281903
| 9781250281906
| 1250281903
| 3.80
| 950
| Oct 18, 2022
| Oct 18, 2022
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it was amazing
| Too many journalists couldn’t seem to grasp their crucial role in American democracy. Almost pathologically, they normalized the abnormal and sensa Too many journalists couldn’t seem to grasp their crucial role in American democracy. Almost pathologically, they normalized the abnormal and sensationalized mundane.------------------------------------- These days, we can clearly see the fallout from decades of declining public trust, the result, at least partly, of so many years of the press being undermined and of undermining itself. What is that fallout? Americans no longer share a common basis of reality. That’s dangerous because American democracy, government by the people, simply can’t function this way.My parents were both readers, which should come as no surprise. Mom, a homemaker, consumed a steady stream of mysteries her entire life, as least the part of it that included me. Dad worked at night, but would set aside some reading time every day, particularly on his days off. He was not much of a book reader, though. His preferred material was the newspaper. Well, newspapers. There was a flood of them coming in, the New York Post (pre-Rupert), the Daily News, The Herald Tribune, The Mirror, the Telegram, the Times. Not saying that we had all of these coming in every day, but all were well represented. And if you wanted to see what he was reading, it was not hard to figure it out. Next to his living room easy chair there was always a stack. If it were books, today, we would call it a TBR. But the stack had a life of its own, and a sorting that was inexplicable. He must have read a fair bit as he kept the pile from overwhelming the room, hell, the entire apartment. I cannot say that I was a big news-reader as kid. More sports than anything. I wanted to keep up with the teams I cared about, the baseball Giants, the Yankees, and eventually the Mets. [image] Margaret Sullivan - image from PBS I was very fortunate to have been raised in an environment in which reading the news, every day, was just a normal part of living. Even though my parents were not well-educated—Mom finished high school. Dad did not.—they valued staying informed. There was no talk at home about reporters slanting stories, although I am sure they did. The news was like the water supply, presumed to be potable, and universally consumed. But there was one exception. It was not until later in life that I began to read the news with a more critical eye, but even as a kid, I could see that sportswriter Dick Young was a mean-spirited son-of-a-bitch, flogging right-wing bile that had nothing to do with sports. I guess that was my first real exposure, consciously anyway, to journalistic political bias. Young was not a person who could be trusted, even though he held a very public position at a major New York newspaper. I doubt, if Dad were still with us, that he would accept what he’d be reading today as revealed truth. But back then, mostly, though, we took the news at face value. Margaret Sullivan, a doyen of media self-reflection, has not been happy with American news reporting for quite some time. The news media, in her view (and in the view of anyone with a brain) is far too concerned with the horserace aspect of political competition, far more than they are with the actual policy substance that differentiates candidates and parties. One of the most respected journalists of her generation, having led a major regional newspaper, and having held two of the most widely read and respected writing posts in contemporary American journalism, she has had a ring-side view of this in action. She worked for thirty-two years at The Buffalo News, rising to be their top editor and a vice president. In 2012 she moved on to be the Public Editor at The New York Times, and in 2016 headed to The Washington Post as a media columnist in the high-powered Style section. She retired from that gig in August of 2022, and is currently teaching part time at Duke while working on a novel. (01/2023 MS announced that she would write a weekly column for The Guardian) She won a Mirror award for her writing on Trump’s first impeachment, served on the Pulitzer Prize board, and was a director of the American Society of News Editors. She has also suffered the slings and arrows of outrageous sexism, as she worked her way through her share of glass ceilings. She knows a thing or two, because she has seen a thing or two. Newsroom Confidential is not just a personal memoir of her career in the newsroom, but a look at the changes that have taken place in journalism and in our view of journalism over her career. It’s high time to ask how public trust in the press steadily plummeted from the years following the Watergate scandal and the publication of the Pentagon Papers in the 1970s—when seven of ten Americans trusted the news—to today’s rock-bottom lows.The high point may have been the inspirational impact of Woodward and Bernstein’s reporting on the Nixon administration’s corruption, Watergate most particularly. It was seeing that journalism was a way to impact the world, to improve it, that moved her to pursue a career in the news. We follow her through the career travails at The Buffalo News. She tells a bit about her full dedication to work conflicting with the demands of having a family, exacerbated by having to cope with the extra resistance of gender bias in her struggle to advance her career. But while Buffalo may have occupied the bulk of her professional life, it does not occupy a proportional piece of the book. The real meat begins with her move to The New York Times. As Public Editor, her role was to be an outsider, looking critically as the work of Times reporters. Not exactly a recipe for making friends. Most editors were not particularly receptive to criticism, constructive or not. The sexism presented straight away, as a Times obituary about a very accomplished woman opened with a description of her cooking skills. Her job was not only to write about wrongs, but to offer recommendations for improvement. It would prove a Sisyphean task. She writes about her personal conflict in taking on a Public Editor investigation into a story written by a Times mentee of hers. While it may have been an important and high-profile position, it was a very tough job at times. One thing I learned back in my twenties is that it is not only the content of articles that merits attention. Their placement is also significant, as is the heading given to those articles. These are often provided by an editor, not the reporter, and are often misleading. Sullivan writes about the most egregious example of the Times doing this, in its treatment of Hillary Clinton during the 2016 presidential campaign. The paper saw Clinton as a “pre-anointed” candidate, presuming that she would win. They wanted to be seen as tough, and were very defensive about being seen as too soft on Democrats. The Times had certainly treated the FBI’s two investigations of the 2016 presidential candidates very differently. It shouted one from the rooftops, and on Trump and Russia the paper used its quiet inside voice, playing right into the Republican candidate’s hands. With a little more than a week to go before the election, the Times published a story with the headline “Investigating Donald Trump, F.B.I. Sees No Clear Link to Russia.” If anyone was concerned about Trump’s ties to Vladimir Putin, their fears might be put to rest by that soothing headline, though the story itself was considerably more nuanced. Even that reporting, not very damning for Trump, appeared on an inside page of the paper, a far cry from the emails coverage splashed all over the front page, day after day. We now know, of course, that Russia had set out to interfere with the election, and did so very effectively.That sort of selective exposure was not exactly new. The Times had been aware, back when John Kerry was running against George W. Bush, of a domestic spying program. They sat on the story for thirteen months, finally posting the information when the reporter who dug up the story threatened to scoop them with his book. The potential impact was considerable, as revelation of the program during the campaign might have impacted the election result. One collateral result of this was that when a later major leaker of government secrets was looking for a trustworthy outlet, the Times was bypassed, because there was no confidence that the paper would publish the material. The Washington Post and The Guardian received the materials instead. She writes about the transition of the news business from paper to digital, the decline in readership overall, and the national decline in news outlets, noting some who railed against the change, and others who saw the future early on and climbed on board. Sullivan’s real reporting bête noire is excessive reliance on anonymous sourcing, aka access journalism. Sure, there are instances in which getting on-the-record quotes is impossible, or even dangerous. But the over-reliance on anonymity has resulted in reporters being played for fools, being fed self-serving tidbits, often intended to dishonestly manipulate public perceptions, often aimed at using reporters as ordnance in internecine political battles, and far too frequently serving no public good. The classic example of this was Judith Miller at the Times, reporting inaccurate intel given to her by members of the Bush Administration in order to build support for a war that was already being planned. In the digital age another piece of this is a compulsion to generate clicks. This creates an incentive for reporters to sometimes hold on to maybe-less-exciting policy stories in favor of pieces that are likely to raise a reader’s temperature. The old trope If it bleeds it leads has been translated into the age of digital journalism as favoring heat over light. It is not really breaking news why people’s trust in journalism has declined. The news was once considered a realm in which professionals investigated and reported stories with an eye toward what was considered newsworthy. But with the demise of the Fairness Doctrine regarding broadcast news, the gates were opened for full-time partisanship in the airwaves. The concentration of media ownership into the hands of fewer and fewer corporations has diluted, if not entirely removed, local news reporting. Now, many local stations broadcast what their distant owners tell them to, including the airing of political puff pieces for favored candidates and issues, and hit pieces for those they oppose. With so many places in the nation reduced to a single newspaper or local news channel, local news has become more and more a mouthpiece of national corporate views. The availability of diverse perspectives in any small market papers or broadcasts, has been considerably reduced. The rise of the internet has had a huge impact on how we receive and perceive news. But a major reason, maybe the biggest, for a loss of faith in the media is the relentless assault on mainstream media by the right. Bias in the media is hardly new, but the unceasing emotionally-charged torrent of lies from right-wing media has raised dishonesty to a new, steroidal level. Every article that portrays Republicans or their supporters in a less than flattering light is attacked as evidence of some imaginary left-wing bias. One result of this relentless attack machine is that many outlets have become reluctant to report actual facts, lest they be attacked as biased. The Times, for example, took years to finally come around to describing Donald Trump’s blatant lies as just that. Can you fully trust a paper that is so weak-kneed about reporting the facts? Even regular Times readers must wonder. And, of course, those on the right now attack any media outlet that does not totally support the GOP party line. Even where no bias is present, many, if not all, on the right claim to see unfairness because they have been told thousands of times that such bias is always present. And the right is fond of using the threat of lawsuits to harass their targets. Trump is notorious for suing the objects of his ire, not expecting to win in court, but hoping to cost the sued large sums of money in legal fees, thus intimidating them, and, he hopes, deterring them from crossing him again. At least the Times has the resources to stand up to such bullying, but there are many media outlets that do not. Thus, MSM reporting slants away from truth. Sullivan’s experiences writing for the Times and Post are fascinating, offering a view from inside the fishbowl, of the cultures, and some of the personalities, the battles that were fought against external attackers and the internecine conflicts that occur everywhere. If Dad were around today, I expect he would approve of the many news subscriptions my wife and I share, the Times, the Washington Post, Philadelphia Inquirer, Daily Beast, our local paper, et al. Our stacks of unread material may not accumulate next to chairs in our living room, but reside instead in a black hole of unread materials and a digital TBR of things we intend to get to. We have come to view news reporting with critical eyes, sensitive to biases that creep into (or are on full display) the text of pieces, aware of how those pieces are presented, where, when, and why. The sort of trust in the news that was extant in the middle twentieth century is gone. But that does not mean that all trust has been lost. For those willing to do the work, it is possible to discern good from bad, both in publications and reporters. But it takes a lot more effort today than it ever did. We are aware, as our parents’ generation was less likely to be, of a reporter’s bent. As the world has forced us to look closer at all sorts of informational input (think ingredient lists on food packages), we have become more discriminating consumers of news. This reporter can be relied on. That one cannot. The fracturing of the news into a galaxy of providers has made it easier than ever to choose only the news that that fits preconceived perspectives. But it is not exactly a news-flash that it remains possible to find quality reporting. It just takes a bit of digging. As for Sullivan’s look back at her career and the shift in public perceptions, it is revelatory, informative, and engaging. If you know anything at all about Sullivan’s writing, this will not come as a shock. The bad news? The decline in public trust of media is very real, as is the reduction in local reporting. The good news? (I believe) people are becoming more aware of bias in supposedly neutral news media. Trust in journalism can be rebuilt, but it is clear that many outlets rely on readers/watchers accepting their reporting with uncritical eyes. After you read Newsroom Confidential you will have a greater sense of what the journalistic challenges are today, both for readers and producers of news. You will not be able to say That’s news to me. Review posted – 11/18/22 Pub dates - 10/18/22 (hc) - 05/12/23 (tp) I received an ARE of Newsroom Confidential from St. Martin’s Press in return for a fair and balanced review. Thanks, folks, and thanks to NetGalley for facilitating. [image] [image] [image] [image] This review has been cross-posted on my site, Coot’s Reviews. Stop by and say Hi! =============================EXTRA STUFF Sullivan's FB and Twitter pages Interviews -----Time - Margaret Sullivan Can Only Indulge in So Much Nostalgia About Journalism - by Karl Vick -----Vogue - Local Journalism Is Dying, and Margaret Sullivan Is Sounding the Alarm in Ghosting the News - by Michelle Ruiz – not for this book but a fascinating interview -----The Problem with Jon Stewart- also from 2020 – also very good -----PBS - Trump’s Showdown – Margaret Sullivanby Michael Kirk – from 2018 – good stuff Items of Interest from the author -----Sullivan pieces for the Washington Post ----- Sullivan pieces for the New York Times -----The Washington Post - If Trump Runs Again, Do Not Cover Him the Same Way: A Journalist’s Manifesto an adapted excerpt ...more |
Notes are private!
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Oct 31, 2022
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Oct 31, 2022
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194822660X
| 9781948226608
| 194822660X
| 3.75
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| Apr 19, 2022
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really liked it
| When I invited people, I typically would offer up various prompts. I definitely made it clear from the beginning that I was interested in [pieces] tha When I invited people, I typically would offer up various prompts. I definitely made it clear from the beginning that I was interested in [pieces] that explored the ways in which alone time can be maddening and isolating and painful, but also pieces that explored the ways in which alone time can be a thrill, or a joy, or something that you crave but can’t access, which I think a lot of people also experienced during the pandemic. There was this simultaneous excess of loneliness and then absence of solitude, which is something I contemplated a lot. I feel like one thing I learned from making the book—but after it had already been printed, of course—is that our longing for solitude is also another kind of loneliness. I think it relates to my experience of the pandemic, and probably a lot of people’s experience of the pandemic. There was so much loneliness, but also the loneliness of not having solitude. Like, I have kids at home, and solitude is something that I crave. It’s like loneliness from oneself. A lack of connection to yourself. - from the CityLit interview------------------------------------ We're born alone, we live alone, we die alone. Only through our love and friendship can we create the illusion for the moment that we're not alone. - Orson WellesWelles was wrong. No one is born alone. We all emerge from mothers. Even so-called “test-tube” babies gestate in and emerge from a woman. Dying alone is a lot easier to manage, particularly when the passing occurs away from medical care. But, for most of us, even in the age of COVID, there are people likely to be in attendance, even if they are not necessarily the people one might have preferred. We are social creatures from birth. That said, I do take Welles’ point that we are isolated bits of consciousness trapped inside a meat sack. [image] Natalie Eve Garrett - image from her site We are the only true witnesses to our lives, present for every moment, every experience, every feeling. Even our closest friend(s), lover(s), shrink(s) or interrogator(s) can only know a sliver of the totality of us. So what? Is this something we require? Does this mean that we are doomed to aloneness forever? The best we can do to share that self with others is to select subsets, parts of ourselves, immediate needs, likes, reactions, interests, artistic expressions, and feelings to share, to connect our solo consciousness with the greater humanity within which we live, to demand responses, connections back, human links. What if that desirable steady-state of exchange is disrupted, or never settles in at all, for reasons internal or external? CAN ANYONE OUT THERE HEAR ME? But we do have ways of connecting. Communication, if we can muster that. Words, gestures touch, other non-verbal modalities. We are largely telepaths, communicating our consciousness to others through the magic of sight and sound. No station-to station hard wires required. And yet, even given this miracle within us, we can, and often do, experience (suffer from) loneliness. Is loneliness a failure of communication, a reaction to external stimuli (rejection), a mechanism, like pain, that tells us that something needs attending to, or something else entirely? Maybe being lonely is just a garden variety human feeling that we all have from time to time, but that some have in dangerous abundance, in a way like cell growth and replication, which is desirable, versus out-of-control cell growth, which is cancer. In The Lonely Stories, editor Natalie Eve Garrett has called together twenty-two writers of note for their lonely stories, memoir items, not fiction. The quote at top tells us that she was interested in looking at a few things; alone time as burden, blessing, or out of reach, longing for solitude, and feeling isolated in our lives among others. We learn more in that CityLit interview: Even though it’s called The Lonely Stories, I definitely wanted it to encompass facets and permutations of being alone, including joy in solitude, how solitude can be replenishing and healing. So it felt like maybe sometimes I nudged things more in one direction or another and it was really important to me that the book tease out the distinction between the two, because loneliness is being defined as a lack, whereas solitude is kind of the art of feeling at home with oneself. There’s a quote for me that a friend reminded me of, that loneliness is a poverty of self and solitude is a richness of self. I feel that really nicely addresses the paradox of how being alone can be both maddening and joyful.The tales told here cover a range. All of these stories, none longer than eighteen pages, present complexity. No simple woe is me, I’m feeling bad, will be found here. Sure, there is a bit of surviving the breakup of relationships, licking wounds, but there are universal concerns, at the very least concerns that very many of us share. Megan Giddings writes about self-empowerment, allowing herself to function, to survive when alone, whether in a hostile social world or a physically perilous situation. Several writers tell of feeling isolated, lonely and alone in relationships. Imani Perry writes of the singular loneliness of the hospital room, and of how many of those offering help do so out of social obligation, without substantive intent or understanding. Maggie Shipstead writes of the up and down sides to experiencing the beauty of nature while alone. ( The natural beauty I saw while walking my dog—the frozen ponds and snowy beaches, the tender pale sunsets over whitecapped ocean—sometimes felt irrelevant, even discouraging, without anyone else to stand there with me and say something like, Wow, so pretty) She and others write about the joys of being alone. Sometimes coping with loneliness requires some creativity. One writer tells of concocting imaginary helpers to beat back the night. COVID figures in some stories, one in a particularly dramatic way. Of course, one can choose to be alone and find that it is not quite what one had hoped for. Lev Grossman’s story of setting out to make his fortune as a writer was hilarious, and hit very close to home. ( I can’t overstate how little I knew about myself at twenty-two or how little I’d thought about what I was doing.) Of course choosing to be alone works out just fine for Helena Fitzgerald and Melissa Febos. A question is raised; Can succeeding at aloneness spoil you for togetherness? There are stories that will make you weep, stories that will make you laugh out loud, stories that will make you think, and stories that will make you feel. There are stories that deal with racism, alcoholism, marriage, rejection by one’s only parent, the loss of one’s parents to age and/or dementia. Three writers tell of the experience of immigration, one of multiple immigrations, and how being the outsider can stoke the engines of loneliness to a high intensity. One of the most powerful pieces here is Yiyun Li’s story of public and private language. (Loneliness is the inability to speak with another in one’s private language. ) Anthony Doerr goes from a consideration of his on-line addiction to a concern about whether he actually exists at all. We think of writing as a solitary undertaking, yet some of the stories here point to writing as a way to create connections with other people. One take on dream interpretation is that every person, every character in a dream is some manifestation of yourself. The experience of reading The Lonely Stories was a bit like that for me. In so many of the tales I could see myself in the experience of the story-tellers. I imagine that will be the case for many of you as well. An aspect of this book that was, and probably should not have been surprising, (given the quality of the writers. Really good writing often has this effect.) was that I felt prompted to recall personal memories of loneliness, and it took some effort to turn that spigot off after only a dozen. I could have easily made this review a platform for my lonely stories, which would have been a disservice. (What if I alternate one of mine with one of theirs? went my inner gremlins. Wisdom won out. You have been spared.) It is the sort of book that would serve well as a springboard for a writing class. Everyone has felt lonely, if not all the time, then in some particular moments or parts of our lives. How about you tell of a time when you were lonely? The tales here will prompt you to think about a time, or many times when experiences, when feelings you had might fit quite nicely into a collection like this. One thing I wished for was more of a look at definitions, where loneliness ends and being alone begins, for example. Where is the line between solitude and isolation? Where does the need to communicate run into a need for privacy? A three-dimension spectrum of solitude (not to be confused with the Fortress of Solitude) might be an interesting way to visualize aloneness, with the X-axis reflecting the degree of solitude, measured, I guess, in interactions per day in person or via comms, the Y-Axis indicating how much personal choice is involved (probably not much for a prisoner, some, for most people, more for a single person of means) and the Z-axis reflecting how a person feels about their XY intersection, with end-points at going insane and I’m good. Add color if a fourth dimension is needed. But maybe that would be in a psychology book, and not a memoir collection, so fine, whatever. There was an opportunity missed here in the selection of writers. Loneliness is a particular factor with older people, yet the oldest (that I could determine from simple Google searching) contributor is 60. Not a single fully vested Social Security recipient in the bunch, at least as far as I could tell. Bottom line is that, while the title of this book may suggest it could be a downer, The Lonely Stories is anything but. It not only connects on an emotional level, but offers a wide range of insight into the human condition. You will laugh and cry, and maybe feel prompted to consider loneliness, or lonely times in your own experience. One thing is for certain. However you react to this book, you will not be alone in that reaction. It’s the worst loneliness, I think, the loneliness we feel among those we feel we should be most like. Our tribe turns out not to be quite our tribe. Review posted – April 29, 2022 Publication date – April 19, 2022 I received an ARE of The Lonely Stories from Counterpoint in return for a fair review. Thanks, folks. I felt less alone while reading the book and writing about it. [image] [image] [image] [image] This review has been, or soon will be, cross-posted on my site, Coot’s Reviews. Stop by and say Hi! =============================EXTRA STUFF Links to the author’s personal, FB, Instagram, and Twitter pages Interviews -----Catapult - Natalie Eve Garrett Wants Us to Feel Loneliness Without Shame by Tajja Isen -----CityLit Project - Navigating Solitude with Kristen Radtke, Natalie Eve Garrett, & Nguyen Koi Nguyen Songs/Music -----Roy Orbison - Only the Lonely -----Paul Anka - I’m Just a lonely Boy -----B.J. Thomas - I’m So lonely I Could Die -----Charlie Haden - Lonely Town -----Bobby Vinton - Mr. Lonely -----Yes - Owner of a Lonely Heart -----Gilbert o’Sullivan - Alone Again -----Carousel (the film) – Rogers & Hammerstein – Claramae Turner - You’ll Never Walk Alone -----Les Miserables – Lea Salonga (concert performance) - On My Own Items of Interest -----Garbo - ”I want to be alone” -----Roots of Loneliness - Solitude Vs. Loneliness: How To Be Alone Without Feeling Lonely by Saprina Panday -----The loneliness of the Long Distance Runner by Alan Sillitoe – complete text ----- Frontiers in genetics - Long-Term Impact of Social Isolation and Molecular Underpinnings ...more |
Notes are private!
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Apr 16, 2022
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Apr 25, 2022
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Apr 25, 2022
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Paperback
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125027236X
| 9781250272362
| 125027236X
| 4.05
| 616
| unknown
| Feb 22, 2022
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really liked it
| …sensation is not simply a process of gathering information from the periphery and funnelling it to the brain, but that actually the brain can infl …sensation is not simply a process of gathering information from the periphery and funnelling it to the brain, but that actually the brain can influence the data being captured. This is referred to as bottom-up and top-down processing, respectively. But this two-way flow of information is not limited to sensation, or even our senses; it is a feature of how every tenet of our nervous system works.-------------------------------------- …when we listen, what we hear is the result of the process of making sense of these pressure waves all around us, ascribing meaning to these tremblings of molecules. It is an early warning system, an awareness of what lies in wait immediately beyond our bodies or outside our field of vision. It is also an effective mode of communication. As the authors of the textbook Auditory Neuroscience state, ‘Every time you talk to someone, you are effectively engaging in something that can only be described as telepathic activity, as you are effectively “beaming your thoughts into the other person’s head,” using as your medium a form of “invisible vibrations”.’We tend to think of our senses as pure forms of data gathering. Physical sense encounters external stimuli and transfers that information directly to the brain, where the info is incorporated. Seems simple and direct, no? It might be were it actually the case. But it is most certainly NOT the case. We know for a fact that people believe whatever they want to believe, regardless of extant reality. January 6, 2021 and your crazy, Fox-addicted uncle offer prime examples of that. But it is also the case that believing is, literally, seeing, on a much more immediate, personal, sensate level, extending far beyond the willful ignorance of political (and reportorial) bubble-think. [image] Dr. Guy Leschziner - image from his Goodreads profile Dr. Guy Leschziner, a consultant neurologist in the Departments of Neurology and Sleep Disorders Centre at Guy’s and St Thomas’ Hospitals (where he runs the Sleep Disorders Centre) and at several other London institutions, presenter of several series for BBC on the brain and sleep, reports on a collection of people with unusual sensate experiences. (Sadly, none look anything like the amazing sense-connections of the characters on the fabulous TV series Sense8), If you were expecting an entire book on synesthesia, (which you might, given the somewhat misleading book title) you might have to feel that elsewhere. Yes, there is a bit of that in here, but mostly the book explores the interactions between our senses and our brains, and even considers the nature of reality as it is, versus how we might perceive it. And if you thought the doctor would limit himself to our five senses, well, mostly, but not entirely. He does write a bit about other elements of our being that might be considered senses beyond the five. Generally, the book is about the doctor figuring out what is causing strange sensations for his patients. Case histories abound. Mark hears his personal noises (chewing, breathing, and other) at way too high a volume, while the sounds of the external world are muffled. A TV personality has lost his ability to hear bird songs above a certain pitch, then starts hearing loud sounds everywhere, and a musical playlist that holds no appeal. Abi can experience basic tastes, but not flavor, as she has never had a sense of smell. Leschziner riffs on the difference between the two, offering a very surprising (to me, anyway) conclusion about the latter. There is a wonderful section on how smell impacts a wide range of human activities, including, but not limited to, the obvious ones about the edibility of food, and repulsiveness of rot, but how we make many social decisions based on an unconscious (mostly) reactions to personal odors. It certainly manifests in language. This look at olfaction passes the smell test, does not at all stink to high heaven, or smell fishy, and if called by any other name, it would smell as sweet. It is not to be sniffed at, or do you smell a rat? A sommelier loses her sense of taste, making it a bit of a challenge to do her job. You will learn a lot about how flavor informs our lives, and how it is actually constructed. Miriam’ s feet always feel burning hot. No matches in shoes involved. Alison’s feel for temperature is reversed. Dawn experiences massive pain in her face hundreds of times a day. Paul feels no pain. You might think this is a good thing, with obvious benefits. But the downsides can really hurt. Synesthesia does put in an appearance. For James, sounds have taste and texture. Valerie sees color associated with sound. Sometimes colors do seem too loud, even to those of us with the usual sense experiences. Is this a case of synesthesia in language? ‘My favourite Tube station was Tottenham Court Road, because there’s so many lovely words in there. “Tottenham” produced the taste and texture of a sausage; “Court” was like an egg – a fried egg but not a runny fried egg: a lovely crispy fried egg. And “Road” was toast. So there you’ve got a pre-made breakfast. But further along the Central Line was one of the worst ones, that used to taste like an aerosol can – you know, the aftertaste you get from hairspray. That was Bond Street.’It is the associations our sensate experiences have with our past, with our emotions with our thought processes, that give them value far beyond the immediate physical information they provide, whether one is a Proustian character recalling a large chunk of his past prompted by dipping a madeleine in a cup of tea, or one is a less literary sort, recalling a moment from early parenthood, prompted by the particular scents in the baby products section of a store. not only is there an overlap between olfaction and emotion, but also olfaction and emotional memory. Those regions of the brain involved in olfaction and emotional processing also have a strong role in memory.Ranging beyond, Leschziner writes of a woman’s inability to construct internal visions, and of the phantom limb experience of many who have endured amputations. Our sense of ourselves in space gets a look as well, prompting you to wonder just what the criteria might be for defining what does and does not qualify a bodily experience to be called an actual sense. Leschziner has an engaging writing style and keeps the intel delivery at an accessible pop-science level, for the most part. On occasion, a bit too much technical jargon does find a way in, but just skip past when it does. There are occasional moments of humor, one actual LOL, for me, anyway. But this is not a significant feature of his writing. This book is brain candy of the first order (another synesthetic bit of language. Once you get a taste for the stuff, examples do start to stand out.) Not only does Leschziner point out the ways in which what we consider normal, or at least typical, human sensation works, he shows how some senses work through intermediaries, while others get a direct-to-brain, no-TSA-line channel from input to processing. That was news to me. He also offers a discussion about how our brains function as biological time delays, in a way, gathering information to create a picture in the now based on data gathering of conditions in the immediate past, as our brains and senses have far too little bandwidth or supercomputer speed to gather and process all the incoming information in real time. There is another fascinating consideration of the actual nature of reality. It makes The Matrix seem a lot less fantastical. ‘Perception is nothing more than a controlled hallucination.’ This is a commonly used sentence in the world of cognitive neuroscience. Essentially, our brains work as guessing machines, interpreting what is coming in through our senses in the context of our model of the world. What we perceive relates to our existing beliefs about the world, to how what the information our senses provide us interacts with our virtual-reality simulation of the universe.Very much worth a look or a listen, maybe a touch, if you read braille, The Man Who Tasted Words is a treat for your brain, and your senses, however they work. the brain is not simply an absorber of information. It is a prediction machine. Our perception of the world is based upon predictions of how we expect our world to be, a necessary shortcut to deal with those three flaws, of data capacity, inherent delay and ambiguity. Review posted – February 25, 2022 Publication date – February 22, 2022 I received an ARE of The Man Who Tasted Words from St. Martin’s Press in return for a fair review. Thanks, folks. It smelled and tasted great. [image] [image] [image] [image] This review will soon be cross-posted on my site, Coot’s Reviews =============================EXTRA STUFF Links to the author’s personal, Instagram, and Twitter pages Leschziner is a consultant neurologist in the Departments of Neurology and Sleep Disorders Centre at Guy’s and St Thomas’ Hospitals (where he runs the Sleep Disorders Centre) and at several other London institutions. He has presented several series for BBC on the brain and sleep. The Man Who Tasted Words is his third book, the second intended for general readers. Interviews -----The Observer - Guy Leschziner: ‘Reality is entirely a construct of our nervous system’ by Andrew Anthony -----Intelligence Squared - Exploring the Senses, with Guy Leschziner by Helen Czerski – audio – 47:59 Items of Interest from the author -----BBC Radio - Mysteries of Sleep - Three lectures,, about a half hour each -----BBC – The Compass - The Senses - audio – 26:29 -----The Daily Mail - The bizarre condition that keeps a choir singing Land of Hope and Glory inside Bill Oddie's head: New book reveals what happens when our senses go haywire... including a woman who smelled rotting flesh for years, and another who felt scalded by cold water- an extract -----Owltail - 17 Podcast Episodes Item of Interest -----WebMD – on Synesthesia ...more |
Notes are private!
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Feb 07, 2022
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Feb 20, 2022
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Feb 22, 2022
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Hardcover
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1982129476
| 9781982129477
| 1982129476
| 3.66
| 9,571
| Mar 02, 2021
| Mar 02, 2021
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really liked it
| ”Close your eyes and count to ten,” he whispered. I felt his breath on my cheek. The barrel of the gun was hard and cold against my forehead. ”Close your eyes and count to ten,” he whispered. I felt his breath on my cheek. The barrel of the gun was hard and cold against my forehead.Thus begins The Babysitter, a telling of growing up unaware that one of the author’s favorite adults was not who she’d thought. [image] Liza Rodman - image from Simon & Schuster – Photo by Joel Benjamin In 2005, Liza Rodman, then in her forties, was working on the thesis for her undergraduate degree when she began having frequent nightmares. It was not her first such experience. She had had these for a long time, but all of a sudden they were happening every night. In one, her husband was trying to kill her with a fireplace poker. Another featured a man killing nurses and eating their hearts. The dreams kept coming, with a faceless man chasing her, always with a weapon. She would wake up as her dream self was about to crash through a window, fleeing for her life. [image] Jennifer Jordan - image from her site – photo by Jeff Rhoads Clearly there was motivation to figure out this puzzle, so she started writing about them, incorporating them into her thesis, over a two year period, drawing out more and more details. One dream-site was The Royal Coachman motel where she, her mother, and sister had lived for a time in Provincetown. Another was Bayberry Bend, a P-town motel her mother had owned. Slowly the process moved along, six months of regular dreams, more images, months more of nightmares, until she saw the face, a familiar one, someone she hadn’t seen since she was a kid, a handyman hired to work at the motel where her mother was employed. His mother worked at the motel too. He was one of a series of people who took care of her and her sister, a really nice guy, one of the few adults who were kind to them, who never yelled at or hit them, who took them around with him in the motel’s utility truck, on chores, to the dump, to his garden in the woods, but who had disappeared when she was ten. This was not all that unusual for the adult males who scooted through her childhood. Why would she be having dark dreams about that guy? So she decides to ask her mother, then in her 70s, what this might all mean. “Did something happen to me back then that you’re not telling me?” I said, suddenly wondering if it did.Oh, is that all? Not all that surprising from Betty. Liza’s divorced mom was not exactly the best. While she did manage to keep body and soul together for herself and her two girls, she was frequently cruel to Liza, for no reason that the child could fathom. Mom, in fact is a major focus of the book, as chapters flip back and forth, more or less, between a focus on Tony and a focus on Liza and her relationship with her mother. [image] Antone Charles “Tony” Costa, Provincetown handyman and murderer of four young women. (Photo courtesy Barnstable County Identity Bureau) – image from the author’s site Who was this guy? Tony Costa never got to know his father, who had drowned trying to save a fellow seaman in New Guinea near the end of World War II, when Tony was only eight months old. He would be obsessed with his war hero dad for the rest of his life. There were early signs of trouble with Tony. At age seven he claimed to have been visited regularly by a man in his bedroom at night, an actual intruder? a fantasy? an obsession? He said the man looked like his father. He stood out among his peers during summers in Provincetown, his mother’s birthplace, cooler, smarter, and more “inside himself” than anyone else, according to a kid he hung out with there. Then there was the taxidermy kit. Lots of killing of small animals, neighborhood pets going missing, yet never a successful display of a stuffed animal. There is no mention of bed-wetting in his psychopath Bingo card, but who knows? We know he was raped as a pre-teen, and was probably one of several victims of sexual abuse by a Catholic priest in Provincetown. So his potential for madness certainly had some outside assistance. He was accused of attempting to rape a young girl as a teen. [image] Jen and Liza, Northampton, 1979 - image from Rodman’s site Tony was smart and handsome, but had terrible judgment, a ne’er do well, capable at work but unable to hold onto a job. He became a heavy drug user and local dealer. Clearly this guy had some charisma (as well as a considerable supply of illegal substances) and a way with young teens. A pedophile who married his pregnant fourteen-year-old girlfriend, he kept a crowd of young acolytes around him unable or unwilling to see through his line of distilled, grandiose, narcissistic bullshit. Cult-leader stuff. There is a Manson-like quality to him. And, like most narcissists, he was never willing to accept any responsibility for his own actions, always insisting that people were out to get him, blaming others for things he had done. [image] The VW Tony stole after murdering its owner. A local spotted it in the woods and notified the local police, which spelled doom for Tony Costa - image from the author’s FB pages There is more going on here than personal profiles of the major actors. A lot is made of how different from the mainstream Provincetown was, particularly during the tourist season. The ethos was much more accepting of whatever than most places. With people coming and going so much, it was custom-made for a predator. It was the 60s, man, drugs, sex, and rock ‘n roll, and kids taking off for adventures, whether drug-related or not, and thus not necessarily raising instant alarms when they went missing. In 1971, for example, I bought an old Post Office truck at auction for three hundred bucks, and drove across country with three friends. (well, tried, we never actually made it across the continent) No cellphone, no regular check-ins. We didn’t exactly file a flight plan. If we had come to a bad end, no one would have known, or been alarmed back home for weeks. This is something a lot of people did. Of course, we were not runaways, and we were not female. That would have been a whole other order of business. The cops in Provincetown took a lackadaisical attitude toward worried parents looking for missing progeny. “Don’t worry. I’m sure they will turn up in due time.” And they were probably right, mostly. Except, sometimes they weren’t. It took a lot of pushing from those concerned about the missing young women to get the police to pay much attention. Rodman and Jordan provide a very detailed look at the various police departments that became involved in Tony’s case, both the occasional good police work and the ineptitude of inter-departmental communications. Sound familiar? The locals were slow to allow for the possibility that there was a killer in their midst. Even today, there is an urge to protect one of their own, despite it being fifty years since the events of the book. “I got threats when I wrote this book,” Liza says. It’s a loving portrait of the town, but not especially flattering. “I have a comfort level there that I don’t have anywhere else. Even in the face of this book.” - from The Provincetown Independent [image] It was her sister’s 8th birthday. At the moment Liza was making a face at the camera, Tony was leading two young women into the Truro woods, where he would murder and bury them. - image from the author’s FB pages One of the things about true crime books is that there is an element of suspense that is lacking. We know that little Liza will grow up to write this book, so we know that Tony did not kill her. This makes it more like a Columbo episode, knowing that the bad guy will get got, but enjoying seeing how that ultimately happens. That said, this is not a straight-up true crime effort. It is a fusion of true crime with memoir. Half of the book is about Liza’s childhood, her relationship with her mother in particular. It is an interesting look at how someone can survive a bad parent-child relationship. Showing how things were for Liza at home makes her a more sympathetic narrator for the other story. Geez, ya poor kid. I sure hope nothing else bad happens t’ya. And it makes it much more understandable how a kid who was starved for adult affection and attention would be drawn to an adult who was offering kindness and interest. I did not get the frisson of fear reading this that pervaded in another true crime book, I'll Be Gone in the Dark. Maybe because the killer in this one was long ago jailed, whereas the California killer had not yet been arrested when that book came out. But there is a certain vertigo, like walking near a cliff edge, blindfolded, only to realize the danger you were in when you take it off. It is distinctly possible that Liza might have found her way into Tony’s special garden if he had managed to stay out of jail for a few more years. Liza was like the little girl playing with Frankenstein's monster in the movie, not realizing that he was more than just a large playmate, and seemingly friendly soul. Whew! Rodman had been working on this project for about thirteen years. It happened that, in 2018, Jordan, a professional writer, was casting about for her next book project (She had previously published four books.) when she thought of her dear friend, Liza, (they had met in college) who was thrilled at the suggestion that they collaborate. So, sixteen years of research in all and here it is. An in depth look at a monstrous series of events, a sick individual, an interesting place in a time of upheaval, a difficult childhood, an odd friendship, and a very close call. The Babysitter is an engaging, informative read that will make you appreciate your sane parents, most likely, and appreciate your luck even more in never having had such a person as Tony in your life. (You haven’t, right?) His coterie of teenagers, his stash of pills, and his marijuana helped mask his ever-increasing feelings of inferiority; by surrounding himself with idolizing acolytes who needed a hero, he could feel more in control, sophisticated, confident, and, of course, more intelligent. Review first posted – March 5, 2021 Publication dates ----------Hardcover - March 2, 2021 ----------Trade Paperback - June 14, 2022 I received an ARE of The Babysitter from Atria in return for an honest review. I did not charge them my usual rate of ten bucks an hour and whatever I want to eat from their fridge. [image] [image] [image] I have posted the entire review on my site, Coot’s Reviews. Stop by and say Hi! ===========================EXTRA STUFF Links to Liza Rodman’s ’s personal, FB, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Twitter pages Links to Jennifer Jordan’s personal and FB pages Interviews -----Red Carpet Crash – February 24, 2021 - Interview: Authors ‘Liza Rodman And Jennifer Jordan’ Talk Their Book The Babysitter: My Summers With A Serial Killer - audio – 17:02 - definitely check this one out -----New York Post - February 27, 2021 - How I discovered my babysitter Tony Costa was a serial killer by Raquel Laneri -----The Provincetown Independent – February 24, 2021 - Remembrance of Serial Murders Past by Howard Karren -----WickedLocal.com – February 23, 2021 - In new memoir, local serial killer Tony Costa babysat two youngsters by Susan Blood Items of Interest -----Frankenstein playing with sweet young Maria -----Columbo - or substituting for whodunit the howchatchem -----My review of I'll Be Gone in the Dark Songs/Music The author's site provides a link to a considerable list of 39 songs mentioned in the book. But you have to have a membership to hear the full songs on Spotify instead of just the clips that are available on Rodman’s site. ...more |
Notes are private!
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Feb 14, 2021
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Feb 22, 2021
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Mar 03, 2021
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1501198505
| 9781501198502
| 1501198505
| 4.14
| 1,343
| Aug 27, 2020
| Jan 05, 2021
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it was amazing
| Like a bird flying repeatedly into a pane of glass, I kept seeking Heathcote. Each time I reached out for him, the crack yawned open just a little Like a bird flying repeatedly into a pane of glass, I kept seeking Heathcote. Each time I reached out for him, the crack yawned open just a little wider, until eventually. I hurtled straight through.-------------------------------------- How do you let go of someone you never had?Charlie Gilmour was living in southeast London when his partner’s sister came across an abandoned chick. Magpies leave home far too soon—long before they can really fly or properly fend for themselves. For weeks after they fledge their nests, they’re dependent on their parents for sustenance, protection, and an education too. But this bird’s parents are nowhere to be seen. They’re nor feeding it, or watching it, or guarding it; no alarm calls sound as a large apex predator approaches with footfalls made heavy by steel-toed boots. It could be no accident that the bird is on the ground. If food was running short, a savage calculation may have been performed, showing that the only way to keep the family airborne was to jettison the runt.[image] From infancy to adulthood – From Charlie’s eulogy for Heathcote –photos by Polly Sampson and Charlie This small bird with a huge personality caught his attention. Charlie’s struggles to care for, to raise, this raucous magpie parallels his growth as a person, and his lifelong struggle to get to know the man who had abandoned him as a an old boyhood dream Of having a jackdaw on your shoulder, like a pirate. Whispering secrets in your ear Charlie seizes on this connection when he discovered the poem his father had written about the experience. “Initially it was just meant to be a light-hearted story about this magpie that came to live with me, roosted in my hair, shat all over my clothes and stole my house keys. When my biological father died, though, it became a much, much more complicated story. Honestly, I really didn’t know what the book was about until I was quite far into the writing process.” - From the Vanity Fair interviewWilliams was quite a character, a merry prankster, a Peter Pan sort, grandly creative but not the best at responsibility, able to charm all those around him, doing magic tricks, persuading people that he really was there for them, while never really being able to handle the demands or needs of the people who needed him most, leaving domestic carnage in his wake. Charlie had never really understood why, one day, he suddenly just got up and flew the coop on him and his mother, Polly Samson. This memoir tracks Charlie’s quest to make sense of the father he never really knew. [image] Charlie Gilmour and his beloved magpie Benzene – image from Vanity Fair - photo by Sarah Lee Charlie lucked out in the parent department in another way. When Mom remarried, it was to David Gilmour of Pink Floyd fame. None of David’s music career is addressed here. But he is shown as a stand-up guy, a supportive, understanding, and loving father who takes Charlie under his wing by adopting him. Absent fathers are hardly uncommon. In 97 percent of single parent families, it’s the mother who ends up taking responsibility for the kids. The child’s impulse to seek them out is just as widespread: psychiatrists call it “father hunger”. I was lucky: I was adopted, and the man who became my dad is both a brilliant man and a brilliant parent. But the longing to know your maker is something that lives on. - from the Public reading Room pieceWe follow the growth of Charlie along with Benzene. It is made clear early on that a magpie presents both challenges and delights that are uncommon in human-critter relations. Tales of bird behavior that might have one pulling out hair in clumps (which might actually be useful, as the bird stores food in Charlie’s hair) are told with warmth, and, frequently, hilarity. My favorite of these occurs when Benzene is under the sway of a nesting instinct, having settled on the top of the fridge as a place on which to construct her DIY nest. At a birthday party for her: My dad strums her a song; my younger sister reads a poem; and a family friend, a venerable literary academic named John, unwillingly provides the sex appeal. This rather reserved man of letters is too polite to do anything but quote Shakespeare as Benzene places her birthday bluebottles and beetles lovingly up his sleeve and tugs the hem of his trousers insistently nestward. [image]= Heathcote Williams planning one of the Windsor free festivals in his Westbourne Park squat, London, in 1974 - Image from his obit in the Guardian - Photo by Richard Adams Charlie’s nesting life is also under development. After he marries his partner and they talk about growing their family, he must confront his fears of being a parent himself. Nature vs nurture. Will he be the absentee his biological father was, or the rock-solid mensch of a parent he lucked into in David Gilmour? Clearly a concern that requires some resolution before going ahead and fertilizing an egg. The issue extends to a question of mental illness. Heathcote had been ill-behaved enough to get institutionalized. It was certainly the case that his behavior often crossed the line from eccentric to certifiable. Did Charlie inherit his father’s proclivities? Is genetics destiny? Charlie had committed some behavioral excesses of his own, consuming vast quantities of illegal substances, which fueled some extremely bad behavior. This landed him on the front pages of the local tabloids, swinging from a beloved and respected war memorial during a protest, and then in prison. [image] Charlie with David Gilmour – image from The Guardian - photo by Sarah Lee Charlie takes us through the attempts he made for many years to connect with Heathcote, but his father offered only teases of interest, always managing to disappear before Charlie could latch on, a hurtful bit of legerdemain. In addition to the title, the names, which largely focus on feather development, given to the five parts of the book, set the tone. All the expected imagery is used throughout, including fledging to nest-building, to mating behavior, to molting, egg-laying and so on. It could easily have been overdone, but I found it charming. In rooting about in Heathcote’s history Charlie offers us, in addition to his personal tale, some of Heathcote’s outrageous adventures from back in the day. Charlie’s personal growth as a person adds heft. I was reminded of a few other memoirs. In Hollywood Park, musician and writer Mikel Jollett tries, a lot more successfully than Charlie, to connect with his missing father, confronting issues of nature vs nurture. Helen MacDonald’s H is for Hawk looks at her training a goshawk as a coping mechanism to help in grieving for and remaining connected to her late father, similar in feathery subject matter, although it is quite a different book. Alan Cumming, in Not My Father’s Son, looks at the damage his father had done to him, trying to figure out how this mercurial man had become so cruel, as Charlie tries to figure out how his mercurial, if not overtly cruel, father had become so nurturing-phobic. John Grogan’s Marley and Me looks at the difficulties of caring for a difficult pet, and the corresponding rewards. It is not necessary to love the memoirist to enjoy their book, but that is not an issue here. Charlie behaved rather poorly, both as a child and an early twenty-something, but learned his lesson, grew up, straightened out, and became a likable, decent sort, a very good writer who is very well able to communicate the struggles through which he has grown. It is easy to root for him to get to the bottom of what made Heathcote tick, and to find a way to make peace with what their minimal relationship had been. His writing is accessible, warm, moving, and at times LOL funny. You will need a few tissues at the ready by the end. Just for padding your roost, of course. In the Archive, the sour smell of mold is somehow even more overpowering than it was at Port Eliot, as if the material is rebelling against the light. At the end of each day I come away filthy, sneezing, and feeling lousy—but I keep going back for more. I need this. My approach is far from methodical. I attack the body of words and images like a carrion bird, looking for the wound that will yield to my prying beak, the original injury that unravels the man. I peel back layers of skin, pick over the bones, snip my way to the heart of the matter. A patchwork biography begins to emerge; a rough story told in scavenged scraps. It feels almost like stealing, like robbing the grave, except it’s not the treasure that interests me. Heathcote’s glories get hardly a glance. It’s the traumas I’m searching for. Answers to those same old questions. Why does a person disappear? What makes a man run from his child? Why was Heathcote so afraid of family? What forces guided that nocturnal flight in Spring so many years ago? Review first posted – February 19, 2021 Publication dates ----------January 5, 2021 - hardcover ----------January 11, 2022 - trade paperback [image] [image] [image] [image] I received an ARE of this book from Scribner in return for an honest review. No feathering of nests was involved. Thanks, folks. And thanks to MC for bringing this to my attention. You know who you are. =============================EXTRA STUFF Links to the author’s personal, FB, Instagram, Tumblr, and Twitter pages Interviews -----The One Show - The One Show: Elton John meets Charlie Gilmour -----David Gilmour: ‘I’ve been bonded to Charlie since he was three. We were incensed by the injustice’ - Charlie and David Gilmour on their relationship and history -----Bookpage - Charlie Gilmour: From feathers to fatherhood by Alice Cary -----Vanity Fair - Birds of a Feather. Interview with Charlie Gilmour by Chiara Nardelli Nonino Songs/Music -----Donovan - The Magpie -----The Beatles - Blackbird Items of Interest from the author -----Vogue - What Raising a Magpie Taught Me About My Famous, Troubled Father -----Waterstones - a promo vid for the book - 1:52 -----5x15 Stories - Featherhood - a story about birds and fathers -----The Guardian - ‘One spring morning my dad vanished’: the son of poet Heathcote Williams looks back -----Public Reading Rooms - Heathcote Williams: Eulogy to the Dad I never knew ----- Charlie’s articles for Vice Items of Interest -----BBC - My Unusual Life | The Man Who Lives With a Magpie - a short doc on Charlie -----Wiki on Pin feathers -----The Guardian - David Gilmour: ‘I’ve been bonded to Charlie since he was three. We were incensed by the injustice’ -----Straight Up Herman – an arts journal blog - Being Kept by a Jackdaw - Heathcote Williams’ poem Other memoirs of interest -----Hollywood Park by Mikel Jollett -----H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald -----Not My Father’s Son by Alan Cumming -----Marley and Me by John Grogan ...more |
Notes are private!
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Feb 02, 2021
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Feb 10, 2021
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Jan 13, 2021
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Hardcover
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1538746832
| 9781538746837
| 1538746832
| 3.73
| 12,238
| Nov 10, 2020
| Nov 10, 2020
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it was amazing
| I’m here because, for the past ten years. I have been haunted by a murder that took place a few steps away. It was told to me my junior year of col I’m here because, for the past ten years. I have been haunted by a murder that took place a few steps away. It was told to me my junior year of college like a ghost story: a young woman, a Harvard graduate student of archaeology, was bludgeoned to death in her off-campus apartment in January 1969. Her body was covered with fur blankets and the killer threw red ochre on her body, a perfect recreation of a burial ritual. No one heard any screams; nothing was stolen. Decades passed, and her case remained unsolved. Unsolved, that is, until yesterday.------------------------------------- “Every nation-state wants an important past,” Karl said. So, often the ruling parties will commission archaeologists. But sometimes the past the archaeologists find is not what the powers want them to find.In Becky Cooper’s gripping true-crime tale, We Keep the Dead Close, there are two mysteries at work. Who brutally murdered Jane Britton and why, and was Harvard University involved in covering up the murder? If so, did they know who the guilty party was? [image] Becky Cooper – from the Boston Globe – photo by Becky Cooper Ok, so here is how I went about reading the book. In addition to entering into my review file the names of the Questions so far -----Was Jim H (Jane’s sort-of bf) at her door at 9a as reported by her friends and neighbors, the Mitchells? -----Where is Jim H now? -----Who were the two men dashing to a car at 12:30a as reported by neighbor Ravi? -----Why was Jane’s cat screaming at 8p, and if the place was effectively soundproof how did neighbor Carol Presser hear it? -----Sounds like the killer was left-handed, given the location of the fatal blow. -----What’s the deal with the red ochre sprinkled over Jane’s body? [image] Jane Britton – image from Wikimedia I kept a separate list for the question of whether Harvard engaged in a coverup. In a book of over 400 pages you can see how this list might grow. And grow it did, even as I checked off many of the questions when they were answered. But that was one of the major joys of reading this, or, I guess, any true crime book, or fictional crime book for that matter. Seeing if what strikes the author, or the investigators, is also what strikes you, the reader, the rousing of our inner Sherlock. Aside from the mystery, the whodunit of the story, there is content in abundance. For example, how can an institution like Harvard at the very least appear to be involved in covering up a crime, and yet remain unaccountable. Maybe that is not so surprising given that, after lives of diverse forms of crime, the Trump family remains on the spacious side of prison bars. But still, there is, or at least should be, some shock value to this. Did Harvard leadership hide a capital crime, did Harvard obstruct justice for fifty years? Cooper looks at evidence suggesting that it did. [image] Professor Karl Lamberg-Karlovsky was a prime suspect in Britton’s murder – image from the NY Post – grad students had accumulated a file on him. One of them died under questionable circumstances. As noted in the opening quote at top, Cooper had come across this story while an undergraduate at Radcliffe. The professor presumed most likely to have done the deed was still teaching at Harvard. Cooper graduated, moved on, was having a life, but the story stuck with her. Ten years after her undergrad days, she returned to the scene of the crime, as a graduate student, determined to find out the truth of Jane Britton’s death. [image] The Dig team in Iran in 1968 - from West Hunter This is a journey very reminiscent of Michelle McNamara’s amazing I’ll Be Gone in the Dark, in which she helped track down the Golden State Killer. Could Cooper do the same? We follow her through the labyrinth of her investigation, talking with everyone who knew Jane at the time of her death, and then branching out to the people who knew the people who knew her. She keeps trying to get access to official police records, a remarkably difficult undertaking for such a cold case, even moreso as Massachusetts is one of the worst states in the nation on Freedom of Information access, and gets in touch with local and state investigators who were involved back then. Suspects get their time in the spotlight, then are replaced with others. Was it one of these, or maybe someone in Jane’s circle who was never thought of as a suspect, or maybe someone else entirely? [image] Jane Britton and Ed Franquemont at their college graduation in 1967 - image from Town & Country – source: the Jane Britton Police File – Franquemont, an ex, was universally disliked by Jane’s friends. He may have been physically abusive to her But there is a whole lot more going on here than a procedural effort to unearth the truth in a nearly fifty-year-old cold case. There is a consideration of historical and all-too-contemporary gender discrimination issues at Harvard, a strong thread about story that permeates, and a subset of that, on rumor as a means of social control. Cooper documents decades of dismissive treatment of women, not just at Harvard, but in academia well beyond those ivied walls. This manifests in many ways. Women at Harvard in the 1970s learned to dress as sexlessly as possible in order to de-emphasize their gender, lest they be seen as less academically capable than their male clasamates. In the 1980s, women were ushered to positions in the university that were high on administrative duties and low in departmental influence. In 1994 Nancy Hopkins documented the bias against women, showing that only 8 percent of the science faculty at MIT were women, and even lower, 5 percent, at Harvard. In 2005 Hopkins confronted then Harvard president Larry Summers at a conference when he claimed that female under-representation in science faculties was the result of innate biological differences. In the twenty-teens, Associate Professor Kimberly Theidon, was active at Harvard speaking out about sex discrimination and sexual assault, faulting Harvard for its lagging sexual assault policy. When her concerns made it into The Crimson, Harvard’s newspaper, her tenure application, which had already been approved by the authorizing committee, was withdrawn. Behind-closed-door deliberations on tenure decisions shields Harvard from much-needed transparency. The tenure decision-making process “is an invitation to abuse,” Howard Georgi, a Harvard physicist who has served on tenure committees told Science magazine in 1999. “There’s no question this has affected women.”The whole notion for the book began, of course, with the story BC heard when she was a Radcliffe undergrad. The police withholding their information made the story of Jane’s death largely oral, and certainly unofficial. And we know from the game Telephone, how stories can change when passed along that way. The file kept by graduate students at Harvard about Karl, with so many elements poorly examined, if researched at all, made that a kind of urban legend. Everybody back at the time of her death had their own experience of Jane and BC tries to make sense of them, learn from their Rashomon-like views the truth of who Jane was. She presents to us a Jane Britton who is not just a body deprived of life, but a three-dimensional person, with a personality, a history, hopes, talents, complications, and ambitions. [image] Jane Britton’s boyfriend, Jim Humphries, was also a possible suspect. – image from the NY Post - source: Jane Britton police file We construct history from the pieces that are available to us. Artifacts, physical objects, letters, photographs, newspaper reports, police reports, spaces that existed then that are still around today. Cooper pursues all she can find, but some will never be unearthed. Sometimes those pieces might lead in opposing directions. Sometimes the pieces might lead nowhere. Sometimes small pieces might hold large truths. Sometimes what seem large pieces hold little explanatory value. Which are the important shards? And which are just detritus? It takes persistence, sensitivity, intelligence, and creativity to make the story we construct of these pieces reflect the truth of the person, the event, or the time we are attempting to describe. Karl Lamberg-Karlovsky’s claim to fame, for example, was not the high academic achievement of his field research. It was his ability to transform the bits he found into a compelling tale. And what about the missing puzzle pieces, the police reports that were kept hidden, the people there in 1968 and 1969 who had died? We can never really know all there is to know. But hopefully we can, with the evidence we are able to gather, get close enough. [image] Richard Michael (Mike) Gramly (many years later, obviously) not only knew Jane at the time of her death, but was also on an expedition when another young woman vanished mysteriously – he was known to have serious anger issues There were rumors bouncing around Jane and her death like neutrons in a nuclear reactor. Many of the people with whom Cooper spoke had a favorite suspect they believed guilty of the crime, offering what they knew or, maybe, had heard or suspected as supporting evidence. Did Ed Franquemont beat her? Was Mike Gramly guilty of maybe two killings? Did Jane have an affair with Karl in Iran? Did Jane threaten to expose a professional lie Karl had told? Did she blackmail him to gain an advantage in her exams, and a place on the next dig? Was Karl a plagiarist? Was Karl a murderer? Did rumors surround him because of his arrogance or because he might be guilty? How about Lee Parsons [sorry, I was unable to find a photo, but Lee is a prime suspect]? Something happened between Lee and Jane at a notorious “Incense Party” at his place. But what? Did Lee confess to killing Jane many years later? In Cooper’s investigative travels she crosses paths with an expert in such things. As I thought more about [medical anthropologist] Mel [Konner]’s assertion that the rumors were a form of punishment, I found myself reading scholarly work on the social functions of gossip. I eventually worked my way to Chris Boehm, a former classmate of Jane’s who’s studied how gossip works in small-scale societies. He had, in fact, used Jane’s murder as an example in his paper about gossip as a form of social control.There is so much going on here, and it is so accessibly presented that you will be rewarded with much more than the knowledge of who killed Jane Britton. You will learn a lot about Harvard, how academia treats women, how gossip works in the world, and how one might go about solving a very cold case. You may or may not want to read this book in the somewhat OCD manner I pursued, focusing on solving the mystery. That way does add considerably to the reading time, as well as the filling feeling one gets from such activities. But whether you dust off each piece of information as it emerges, or speed through Cooper’s excavation on a mud-spattered Jeep, you will be well rewarded. Once you dig out We Keep the Dead Close from your bookseller’s shelves, you will definitely want to keep it close until you finish reading, exploring, and learning. This is an expedition well worth signing up for. …the act of interpretation molds the facts in service of the storyteller. I have been burned enough times to know. There are no true stories; there are only facts, and the stories we tell ourselves about those facts. Review posted – January 8, 2021 Publication dates ----------November 10, 2020 - hardcover ----------September 14, 2021 - trade paperback I received a copy of the book from Grand Central in return for an honest review, or at least, as honest a review as might be possible given the materials I was able to excavate. Thanks, folks. And thanks to MC. You know who you are. You can find the entire, un-chopped-up review on my site, Coot's Reviews. Stop by and say Hi! ==========In the summer of 2019 GR reduced the allowable review size by 25%, from 20,000 to 15,000 characters. In order to accommodate the text beyond that I have moved it to the comments section directly below. [image] ...more |
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Nov 16, 2020
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Jan 04, 2021
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Dec 10, 2020
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Hardcover
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B0881YDNDD
| 3.82
| 89,449
| Jul 14, 2020
| Jul 14, 2020
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it was amazing
| As my father lay dying, Donald went to the movies. If he can in any way profit from your death, he’ll facilitate it, and then he’ll ignore the fact As my father lay dying, Donald went to the movies. If he can in any way profit from your death, he’ll facilitate it, and then he’ll ignore the fact that you died.So, you think your family’s nuts? Usually we have to wait for historians to delve back through the years of a president’s life, digging through letters and writings, interviewing any who might have interacted with them, checking their letters and writings, to cull relevant bits, suss out impactful events, discern motivations and understand how that president came to make the decisions he (still only he) made. Also, sift fact from spin or worse in former presidents’ memoirs and other writings [image] Mary Trump - image from Inside Edition It is quite likely that Donald Trump may be the most written about person, let alone politician, in modern American history. And despite his attempts, many of them, sadly, all too successful, to protect his information from the world, (still waiting on those tax returns) there are so many eyes looking his way, so many searchlights in the darkness, that details continue to emerge, daily, it seems. But there are few who have the sort of access available to a family member. Reporters and historians did not have the personal experiences of dealing with him in a household setting. His remaining siblings have their own reasons to keep their counsel, despite the odd secretly-taped statement that finds its way to the public arena. But we have something pretty close, if a generation removed. Not a sibling, but Donald’s niece, Mary Trump, daughter of the eldest of Fred Trump’s children, Freddy. She is not only a family member but a clinical psychologist to boot. While she was not present when Donald was a child, (he was 19 when she was born) she was as familiar as one could be with family who had been, and had personal exposure to him all her life, in addition to the many tales she heard from family members of Donald’s earlier days. The stories she tells paint a picture of how Donald came to be the person he is. She does not offer a hard diagnosis on how much might be genetic and how much nurture, but the implication is clear that it was a substantial mix of both. Whereas Mary [Donald’s mother] was needy, Fred [his father] seemed to have no emotional needs at all. In fact, he was a highly-functioning sociopath. Although uncommon, sociopathy is not rare, afflicting as much as 3 percent of the population. Seventy-five percent of those diagnosed are men. Symptoms of sociopathy include a lack of empathy, a facility for lying, an indifference to right and wrong, abusive behavior, and a lack of interest in the rights of others. Having a sociopath as a parent, especially if there is no one else around to mitigate the effects, all but guarantees severe disruption in how children understand themselves, regulate their emotions, and engage with the world.There are better sources for the details of Donald’s lifelong crime spree. What Mary Trump offers is a look into the poisoned tree from which this rotten apple dropped. One thing that stands out is that, even though Fred Sr encouraged all Donald’s worst qualities, there is rarely any sense that Donald had any positive ones beyond a superficial charm. In the Stephanopoulos interview, though, Mary talks about there having once been some kind inclinations in Donald, but they were squashed by his father. Even as a child, he delighted in bullying children smaller than himself, to the extent that Fred was encouraged to take him out of a school on whose board Fred sat. That must have been a fun conversation. Pop relocated Donald to the New York Military Academy, six miles north of West Point, in upstate New York. It was the equivalent of being sent to reform school for rich kids. A lot of the book focuses on Mary’s father, Freddy, the oldest of the siblings, the one expected to take over the business. He presumed he would be the head of his father’s company, but Pop never really gave him a chance, sticking him with relatively menial work. He was a kid who was kind, had friends, and interests other than his father’s business. This got him labeled as weak and a failure. Fred Senior preferred someone with what he considered a “killer” instinct, which translated into being as sociopathic as he was. He offered zero support for Freddy’s interest in flying, even though he had joined the United States Air Force ROTC in college and put in mad hours flying and training. Even after he secured a choice position as a pilot with TWA, the elite airline of the stars, flying their new 707 from Boston to Los Angeles, a pretty big deal at the time, his father regarded him as nothing more than a bus driver in the sky. But even after abandoning his flying career, and crawling back to his father, Fred Sr. never really gave him a chance at gaining any real authority. Donald, the second son, eight years younger, was more than happy to step into the favorite son shoes. He clearly had the temperament, the narcissism and malignant regard for others that his father so wanted to see in a successor. Mary offers some details on the business disasters that Donald wrought, his business talent pretty much as non-existent as his talent for dishonesty and self-promotion was vast. Even Mary bought into the spin for a long time, not realizing that Fred Sr. had been keeping Donald afloat with hundreds of millions in loans and often illegal gifts. It was when Donald asked her to ghostwrite one of his books that she did some actual research into him, followed him around, and realized just what a totally empty suit he truly was. There are plenty of quotes from this book making the rounds, a passel of stories. I will spare you the full list. But there are few things worth noting. ----------Donald’s disregard for women tracks with his father’s disregard for his wife, and even Donald’s dismissive treatment of her. ----------Donald even tried to steal his siblings’ inheritance, a ploy that was only sidetracked because Fred Sr was having a rare lucid day and smelled a rat, when his lawyer, whom Donald had recruited for this will-rewrite task, asked him to sign some papers. It was Donald’s mother who saw to it that the plot was foiled. ----------It is telling to see how Donald has recreated in his role as president the model set by his father for always keeping his children from any feeling of security. ----------He has inherited pop’s complete incapacity and/or unwillingness to accept any responsibility for his actions. But at some point you become responsible for yourself, and it is clear that whether he has the capacity or not, Donald never will. He will remain a spoiled child, a bully, a danger to anyone near him, and now, as someone with the instruments of national power at his disposal, an actual menace to the planet. One of the overarching feelings I had while reading this book was sadness. However awful Donald is today (and has been almost all his life), it is still a very sad thing for anyone to grow up in a household where a father’s love was not only unavailable, but in which even wanting such affection would be considered a sign of weakness, and cause for rejection and humiliation. Add to this a mother whose narcissism combined with physical illness to ensure that their interactions would be all about her, and never about him. Mary’s relationship with her grandmother, Donald’s mother, is also heart-breaking. Materials from the book are all over the print and digital media. The understandable focus there is on the actual content of the book. What happened, where, and when, what was said, by whom? How did Donald become so awful and what awful things has he done or said that we do not yet know about? Usually unmentioned, or maybe noted in passing, is what a bloody good read this book is. I found myself rapt while poring through it, and not just fascinated by the major multi-car pileup that is Donald’s life, but actually moved, particularly by the other main story Mary tells, that of her father’s demise. What a waste of a life, of an opportunity, and at the hands of madness. Trumps are not known for writing their own books. But Mary had an interest rarely, if ever, seen in the Trump family. It was love of books that set her apart when she was growing up… in what she describes as a “shitty Trump apartment” in the gritty housing projects of Jamaica, Queens, quite different to the rarefied air of the nearby Jamaica Estates where the rest of the family lived. That gave her a grounding in reality. She took the subway to school. And she devoured literature. In her memoir, she recounts that her grandfather’s house did not display a single book until her uncle published his ghostwritten The Art of the Deal in the late 1980s. “I started reading when I was three and a half,” Trump says. “My horizons were already broader than anyone else in the family simply by virtue of that.” - from the Financial Times interviewWhile Mary Trump does not have the objectivity of a true outsider looking at the family, that does not mean that she leaves her clinical toolbox unopened. She has a PhD in clinical psychology. She has observed and had reliable reports on a large swath of Donald’s life, and the lives of other family members, a solid grounding for offering a very well-informed, and analytically incisive, opinion about Donald and other family members. Her personal take on 45 is the best we are likely to ever have in terms of understanding the psychological roots and early journey into madness of our Psycho President. It is a frightening picture. We can only hope that we all get to live long enough to fully appreciate just how valuable it is. Andrew Cuomo, the governor of New York and currently the de facto leader of the country’s COVID-19 response, has committed not only the sin of insufficiently kissing Donald’s ass, but the ultimate sin of showing Donald up by being better and more competent, a real leader who is respected and effective and admired. Donald can’t fight back by shutting Cuomo up or reversing his decisions; having abdicated his authority to lead a nationwide response, he no longer has the ability to counter decisions made at the state level…What he can do in order to offset the powerlessness and rage he feels is to punish the rest of us. He’ll withhold ventilators or steal supplies from states that have not groveled sufficiently…What Donald thinks is justified retaliation is, in this context, mass murder. Review first posted – September 10, 2020 Publication date – July 14, 2020 [image] [image] [image] [image] =============================EXTRA STUFF Links to the author’s Twitter and FB pages Interviews -----ABC News – with George Stephanopoulos - George is a bit hostile, but it is a good interview overall -----Financial Times - Mary Trump: ‘At Least the Borgias supported the arts’ by Edward Luce -----The Guardian - Mary Trump on her Uncle Donald: ‘I used to feel compassion for him. That became impossible’ by David Smith -----Mother Jones - Watch: Mary Trump on Why Donald Trump Lies, Why He’s “Racist,” and Why She Wrote Her Book by David Corn -----MSNBC has chopped up Rachel Maddow’s interview with the author into bits. If I find a complete vid of that interview, I will add it here. Items of Interest -----Wikipedia entry for The Trump Family -----The Lincoln Project - Bloodlines ...more |
Notes are private!
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it was amazing
| I was a particularly tiny child, so anyone who didn’t know me assumed I was a coward. The runt who always got bullied at school. But I wasn’t afrai I was a particularly tiny child, so anyone who didn’t know me assumed I was a coward. The runt who always got bullied at school. But I wasn’t afraid of fighting. I felt like I was bigger and stronger than everyone else—even if I knew that wasn’t really the case.Ilhan Omar arrived in the United states at age twelve. She and her family members were refugees from Somalia. Omar attended her first political caucus at fourteen, (acting as an interpreter for her grandfather) became a citizen at seventeen, a representative in the Minnesota House of Representatives at thirty-four and a Representative to the United States Congress at thirty-six. She established a couple of firsts in Minnesota, first Somali-American and first naturalized citizen from Africa to be elected to office, and she is one of the first two Muslim women elected to the national House of Representatives. Considering where she began, it is remarkable that she has been able to achieve as much as she has. [image] Representative Ilhan Omar - Image from The New Yorker This is What America Looks Like is Omar’s charming, very readable memoir, of her early life in Somalia, the immigration travails her family endured in trying to reach the United States, the adjustments she had to make in adapting to her new home, becoming an American, getting an education, finding a calling in public service and political activism, and working her way into the United States Congress. It is a classic rags-to-riches (well, not entirely, but more on that in a bit) story of someone who, with some help, pulled herself up by her bootstraps, made a home, and has done everything she can to make the district she represents and her new country a better place. [image] The board outside Omar’s Congressional office - Image from RollCall.com The book opens with a very charming tale of how constituents, and supporters from across the world covered the nameplate outside her office with Post-it notes carrying words of support. This caused a brief run-in with building maintenance, as, even with her staff relocating these messages to a space inside her office, the board kept filling up with new ones. This is an excellent omen, an accurate predictor of what a lovely read this book is. Not all fluff, of course. Much of what Omar writes about is deadly serious, but this is not a political tract. It really is about her life before her public service, and what made her the person she is now, chronicling the challenges she had to overcome to be in a position to do some good on a national level. One challenge was having to learn English. In her interview with Elle Magazine, she was asked about the particular show she watched that helped her master the language. The show was "Baywatch," the earlier years. [image] Rep. Ilhan Omar and her then two-year-old daughter, Isra Hirsi, on a trip to Sweden in 2005 – image from Elle Magazine We can expect that in any political memoir, there will be a lot of self-aggrandizement, in the same way that resumes tend to portray as wonderful parts of our lives that could use a bit of burnishing. But we do not really expect much by way of the less cheery side of her life. In addition to fleeing Somalis under fire, and surviving in refugee camps, she spends some time on her marriages, and even on a nervous breakdown that included, among other bad decisions, shaving her head. While she does not devote a lot of ink to this side of her experience, she certainly offers enough, and shows some guts in doing so. She also takes on the political mis-step that occurred when she suggested that the impact of AIPAC was at least in part due to the PACs monetary influence. She was immediately schooled on some of the terminology she had used, and offered a sincere sorry-now-I-know-better apology. She focuses a lot on her combativeness, a trait she had from a very early age. (See the quote at the top of this review) It’s a feature not a bug, and one that any effective legislator should have, to at least some degree. How much was from her mother dying when she was two? How much from spending more time with boys than girls? How much was innate is impossible to tell, but her assertiveness was very-much supported in Somalia by family who adored her, her father and grandfather in particular. Both men were educated. Her father worked in a government job helping to run the nation’s lighthouse network. Grandfather was particularly unusual in that he treated the women and girls in his family as equals. It is unclear how much difference was made by the fact that the family was relatively well-to-do, enough to have their own driver. But surely all contributed to constructing the Ilhan Omar we know. The tale of her four-year experience in refugee camps is chilling. A very close family member died there, along with many others who were carried off by starvation and disease. For a child who grew up in a relatively comfortable family, she has seen her share of hardship and human misery. Those experiences fuel her progressive legislative interests today. Studying nutrition, and working as a community nutrition educator in Minneapolis for several years in order to teach poor immigrants about what foods to buy, and how to prepare them, gave her an appreciation for the needs of the US-born poor as well as the challenges faced by new arrivals. But it was in community organizing that she found her real passion. Her experience in Somalia, in the camps and in American schools gave her plenty of experience contending with bullies. In a precinct caucus in 2014 she was beaten up by five people who were opposed to the candidate whose campaign she was managing. Her description of the politics within the Minneapolis Somali immigrant community was news to me and very eye-opening. It was also news to me that Omar has been able to work with legislators from across the aisle in both the Minnesota and United States Houses of Representatives to craft legislation. Hardly the extremist her opponents see through their red-tinted glasses. I never really found the idea of compromise to be a difficult one. I think oftentimes there are battles, and you have to pick which one to fight today and which one to live on to fight another day. There are seeds we have to plant in order for there to be an opportunity for someone to enjoy that shade tomorrow. - from the Salon interviewAnd it was even greater news to learn that one of her personal political heroes was a powerful leader from a conservative party. You will be very surprised when you find out who. On June 16, 2020, Omar’s father, Nur Omar Mohamed, 67, died of complications from Covid-19. Her relationship with her father is a very considerable element in this book, as it has been in her life. She respected and dearly loved her father, whose good opinion she cherished more than anyone’s. …with God, you can always pray. You can ask for forgiveness. But when Dad walked away, there was no begging for forgiveness. I never wanted to get myself in that position. - from the Salon interview [image] Omar with her father - image from CNN This is What America Looks Like is a remarkable political memoir. It is a very fast read. I blasted through this book in record time, for me, no skimming. Many readers could get through it in a single session. The odds are that you do not know all that much about Omar’s background. I know I didn’t, and I am someone who attends to things political more than the average reader. So there is that. You will learn about who she is beyond who she endorsed in this or that electoral race, what her positions are on a small list of national policy issues, and how the right chooses to vilify her, with their usual degree of honesty. Ilhan Omar has a remarkable story to tell and she tells it exceedingly well. Check this one out. You will not be sorry. Review first posted – June 19, 2020 Publication dates ----------May 26, 2020 - hardcover ----------July 27, 2021 - trade paperback =============================EXTRA STUFF Links to the author’s personal, Twitter and FB pages You might check out the comments added to images IO posted on Instagram, for a flavor of the sort of frothing, psychotic hatred she must endure, thinly veiled death threats included. Some could make a nice bit on Jimmy Kimmel’s Mean Tweets. Some, of course would be better off referred to the FBI for investigation. Interviews -----Elle - An Intimate Conversation Between Rep. Ilhan Omar and Her Daughter, Isra Hirsi by Isra Hirsi – Omar’s 17-year-old daughter -----NPR - Ilhan Omar On Her Memoir And Moving The Needle Toward Progressive Policies -----Salon - Rep. Ilhan Omar talks Trump: "People are ready for someone who isn't triggered" - by Dean Obeidallah -----LA Review of Books - That Better America for Everyone: Talking to Representative Ilhan Omar by Andy Fitch - outstanding and informative Items of Interest -----Literary Hub - an excerpt - Ilhan Omar on Her Early Days Getting Out the Vote -----The New Yorker - The Dangerous Bullying of Ilhan Omar by Masha Gessen – at the end of her piece Gessen says She performs neither humility nor gratitude. Specifically, as it pertains to Nancy Pelosi, there are passages in the book that constitute considerable public gratitude. So, given that Gessen wrote her piece in April 2019, it would seem that Omar has learned a thing or two since being elected to Congress. -----Vox - The controversy over Ilhan Omar and AIPAC money, explained by Matthew Iglesias -----The Guardian - The Squad: progressive Democrats reveal how they got their name by Edward Helmore -----Omar speaking out against destruction of property during protests -----Omar interviewed by Jake Tapper on What De-funding a Police Department looks like - a good look at a movement with a terrible slogan -----Omar quoted Maya Angelou’s poem Still I Rise in response to Trump-rally brownshirts chanting “Send her back” ...more |
Notes are private!
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1948226464
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liked it
| I recognize the ways in which running is transforming me. Through it, I am inflicting violence on myself and my body, submerging myself in pain lik I recognize the ways in which running is transforming me. Through it, I am inflicting violence on myself and my body, submerging myself in pain like I did when I was working in the warehouse alongside my mother, so that I may control the turmoil within me. But unlike any other labor, running relieves me of the weight that I should become better than my parents, my people.Noé Alvarez was at the beginning of his adult life, but he had seen a few things. Growing up near Yakima, WA, at 17, he took a job in a fruit packaging plant where his mother had worked for decades, in order to bring a bit more income into the household. Even though he had worked in the fields and done other physical labor as a kid, it gave him a lot more appreciation for how hard her life had been for all those years and gave him also a feeling of pride in doing his job well. The area promotes itself as The Palm Springs of Washington. Uh, no. It is, however, the area from where Raymond Carver hails, and Carver has provided a less than Palm-Springs-like look at it in his fiction. Hard-scrabble would be a better description. The train tracks that demarcate the town into East and West are no longer representative of the division between poor and rich neighborhoods—only poor and slightly less poor…We still seem trapped in the cycles of Carver’s narratives, as if his words condemned us to a world of loneliness, tarnished relationships, and violence. Seen differently, his words urge youth like us to rewrite ourselves out of these sinkholes. To sprint out of them.His parents had urged him to get out, and it looks like he will. Alvarez is accepted to Whitman College, with a generous aid package. The Hispanic Academic Achievers Program helps out more, so he winds up with a free ride. Off to Walla Walla in 2002. [image] Alvarez running in the event – image from WBUR.ORG In April 2004, two years into his college experience, he hears a speaker on Peace and Dignity Journeys (PDJ), a North American run through indigenous communities, from Alaska to Panama, held every four years. Alvarez had done some running, but was hardly a seasoned long-distance runner. Struggling with the demands of college, and buying in to a negative stereotype of himself and Hispanics generally, he decides this is for him, even asking Whitman for some money to get him started on it. They fork some over, which seems pretty sweet of them. Gotta say, that if it had been my kid dropping out of a free-ride college deal after two years, I would have been less than excited. Why not wait until you get your degree and catch this train the next time through? Sounds like Noé’s parents felt similarly. The man giving the presentation, Pacquiao, warned him of the hardships, but presented it as an event that promoted unity among indigenous peoples. But ok, college was not going all that well for him, so maybe a break was called for. Like, every step of the way, college was a very difficult thing for me. And it happened to coincide then when I was 19 years old with the Peace and Dignity Journeys, a six-month-long run that's organized every four years. And so it kind of saved me. It came - it coincided perfectly. I said, I needed to get out. I couldn't face my family. This is an opportunity for me to kind of hit the restart button and go and figure myself out. - from the NPR interviewThis is how Noé Alvarez found his way to the PDJ, but it is not how the book opens. There are many people who participate in this megamarathon. In the opening, we get a peek at each of the main ones before the event, strobe-light flashes of where they were just before deciding to join, maybe what prompted them. We get a where-are-they-now at the end of the book, a nice book-end. There is also a discontinuity between the event and Alvarez writing about it. I definitely wasn't ready to tell a story at 19. It's a lifelong process to make meaning out of it. I talked to some of the runners and I checked in with them too. I said, "Look, this is what I remember about you, this time. Do you remember that?" They shared information with me that I had blocked out. Then I just got to writing them. I took it scene by scene, just getting it down and figuring it out later, not thinking about the bigger picture because there were so many components to it. Runner's story, my story, dad's story, mom's story. It's a day by day thing. That's how the run was. - from the Salon interviewAlvarez reports on his experiences on this massive run, how he personally endures (or not) the physical demands, his attempts to extract meaning and connection from the PDJ, and his struggle to forge a clearer sense of his identity. In the run, he is only nineteen years old, so there is plenty of identity left to construct. He also fills us in on the uplifting welcomes given the runners in some communities and the occasional hostility of others sharing the road, including being hit by rocks courtesy of passing motorists, and concerns like encountering a mountain lion while running solo in a remote location, or waking up with a back full of blisters, courtesy of some crickets, getting lost in Los Angeles or seeing his knees swell to the size of melons. Though the run was physically taxing on the body, Álvarez joked, “running is the easy part.” Getting along with flawed people with broken histories could be challenging under the best of circumstances. - from the WBUR interviewWe meet, again, the runners whom he joins on the torturous trek from Alaska to Panama. Not all will last for the entirety. One of the strong points of the book is the stories he hears while hanging around the equivalent of a campfire after each day of extreme running. This was a highlight. Interesting, but not so compelling was the dysfunction within the group. The people on the run did not exactly seem like the most welcoming sorts. It certainly works as a descriptive, but does not exactly make us feel all that supportive for many of the runners and managers in this enterprise. People are people, whatever their origin, so this is not a huge shock, but I guess I was hoping that among a group of people who were engaged in a six-month test of their endurance and commitment, it might have been a bit less like middle school with more booze, sex, and snottiness. On the other hand, I have been around positively-minded political people at various stages in my life, and while most are pretty nice, there always seem to be some who are just awful. So, probably, bad on me for having unreasonable expectations. [image] Alvarez today - image from NBC News There is a duality here. Alvarez wants to support and identify with his working-class family, while wanting to feel a connection to a wider world, maybe a chance to fulfill his parents’ wish for him to have a better life than they had had. I know, why can’t one manage both? But it seems that the author, now in his thirties, has made some sort of a divide between the two. I seek elsewhere the spiritual and philosophical truths that running provided me. But within myself I believe that these truths can be achieved without a college education. The world tells me that achievement has to look one way, but I struggle with that.I take serious issue here, as the author appears to be conflating university education with a search for philosophical truths. Sure, it serves that purpose for many people. But it is a meaningful tool that allows one, or at least helps one, to make a decent enough living in the real world that one can afford to continue such truth-seeking without having to scrounge for cash. And Alvarez had some post-college work that was doing some real social good. In a description of his more contemporary life, he is working at lower end jobs than he really needs to. One was as an overnight guard at a museum. Here I contend not only with the mental fatigue of museum silence, but the nervous reality that has haunted and pestered me all my life: that I will always be working class.No shite, Sherlock. Been there, done that. I have my own guard uniform tucked away as well, but unlike Noé, I never really doubted my class status, despite college and graduate school. Sure, some can get out, but for the vast majority, while we may swap collar colors, our relationship to real power remains where it began. And it is likely to remain that way for our children as well. It is called a class-based society, whether the slots we are born into are Indian castes, or striations in the increasingly ill-named American middle class. The clacking dress shoes over marble floors remind me that I am surrounded by people who know where they’re going in life. In these small spaces, even in the most trivial conversations, I pretend that I matter, that people value my insight into random matters of life, literature, and local events.I would not project any sort of peace or direction onto anyone based on the sounds their shoes make on a marble floor. I have worked with many such people, as has Alvarez, and they are as likely to be as unhappy, or as undirected, as anyone walking on softer rubber soles. And if that is not persuasive, a quick look at any decent newspaper coverage of things political or economic should disabuse one of such notions. And maybe some people do value what you have to say. You can be working class and still have something to contribute that is of value, beyond physical labor, if sweat-based work is not sufficient to offer the feelz you need. That this book exists is absolute proof of that. Speaking of which, some of Alvarez’s writing can be beautifully descriptive, while lyrically evocative. It is an ink wash of a world here in rainy Chiapas where we traverse steep highlands with heavy feet, mobbing about the clouds as if in some dream world that smells of firewood. Roads coil around remote Mayan villages that appear and disappear in the fog like ghost towns. The silhouettes of women hunching over the land can be seen in the clouds, working the land, and carrying bundles of firewood on their backs.And then it can sometimes be clunky, for which I blame editors more than Alvarez, unless, of course, things of this sort were raised and changes were overruled by the author. My eye sockets sink with exhaustion… Not likely. Maybe your eyes sink, or it feels like they are sinking, within the sockets, but I expect the sockets stayed exactly where they were. Another. When the rhythms of working-class life cut inside me like broken beer glass, I run. Maybe broken beer bottle glass? What is, actually, broken beer? This sort of thing should result in DMV-like points on one’s poetic license. One further concern. Much is made of the importance of this run to healing. It was never clear enough to me how exactly that worked. Maybe I was missing something. Always a possibility. But repeating what sounded to me like a mantra about how this was about healing and that was about healing without really explaining how, made me feel in need of some healing of my own. There are plenty of wrongs that have been foisted on indigenous people. How does this run help heal those lesions? It sounded to me like a line of political truism taken in, and repeated, by a new, young (19) adherent, who was fully on board, but who did not yet have a deep grasp of the content under the slogan. I am not saying there was not healing of some sort going on, just that it could have used a bit more explication. I did like, in Alvarez’s introductory remarks on the NCRL site, (linked in EXTRA STUFF), his piece about running as a form of connection and prayer. The road is a classic image of the journey of self-discovery. We expect our narrator to begin in one place, both physically and emotionally or psychologically, and end his road trip someplace else, both internally and externally. I am struck ultimately by how little this run actually seemed to impact the author’s life. There is an immediate result, though. He does return to school, completing his expected education and much more, doing work that is of obvious value in the world. Yet finds insufficient psychic reward in that. Surprisingly, he seems no closer to finding what he was looking for years after the event than he was before he joined. While Alvarez may have picked up a nice trove of tales to tell, it was not at all clear that there was enough growth here to write about, given where he is when he writes the story. Does Alvarez feel more connected to his indigenous brothers and sisters, the indigenous communities through which the run passed? Sure. But what does one do with that? Is this a purely personal effort? Does it lead him to look for ways to help support Native American communities, or groups, after the race was over? If so, it was not obvious. He seems shifted more to a generic desire to help poor people. It seemed a very personal journey, despite the initial rationale, and his initial enthusiasm for being included. Which leads one to consider whether this was the intent. He even admits it was a need for a personal restart that was a great motivator. Maybe not all journeys really take you somewhere. Intended or not, that was where this one dropped me off. But the run certainly helped Alvarez embrace who he was at one level, furthering his sense of connection with his family. ==========In the summer of 2019 GR reduced the allowable review size by 25%, from 20,000 to 15,000 characters. In order to accommodate the text beyond that I have moved it to the comments section directly below. [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
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May 24, 2020
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3.93
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liked it
| He was like a 12-year-old in an air traffic control tower, pushing the buttons of government indiscriminately, indifferent to the planes skidding a He was like a 12-year-old in an air traffic control tower, pushing the buttons of government indiscriminately, indifferent to the planes skidding across the runway and the flights frantically diverting away from the airport. This was not how it was supposed to be.---------------------------------------- In the history of American democracy, we have had undisciplined presidents. We have had incurious presidents. We have had inexperienced presidents. We have had amoral presidents. Rarely if ever before have we had them all at once.Given the spate of news reports and exposés in newspapers, magazines, TV, and in social media, it is impossible to keep up, as the outrages revealed last week are topped by the revelations brought forth this week, which will, of course, be topped by the revelations coming out next week in the book by whichever former Administration official or government whistle blower is next up. What makes any of them any different from any other? We know that Trump lies incessantly, so it is no shock to anyone with a functional brain when yet another lie is shown to be just that. What makes this book different (and, having read only a few of these things, I may be omitting similarities to books I have not taken in) is the view, fueled by observation, of just how bad things actually are. In September, 2018, The New York Times published an op-ed by the author (I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration), which caused a stir. The notions expressed there were developed into a book, A Warning, which was published in November 2019. The administration was only a few weeks in, and already the mayhem made everyone look foolish. Internal whispers grew louder; This was not a way to do business. As a result, people who’d previously been outsiders to Trump World grew closer to one another and developed a bizarre sense of fraternity, like bank-robbery hostages lying on the floor at gun-point, unable to sound the alarm but aware that everyone else was stricken with the same fear of the unknown.The author, who purports to be a “Senior Trump Administration Official,” divides the book between references to classical sociopolitical looks at leadership, and his-or-her first-hand observations (and second-hand reports) of Trump’s behavior, with a bit of analysis of the groups and competing interests within the Administration. Anonymous looks at what the ancient Greeks considered the ideal traits of a leader, using Cicero’s De Officiis (On Duties) as the measure. Point by point, the author contrasts the qualities thought desirable in a leader to the traits of Donald J. Trump. Things like Wisdom, Sense of Justice, Courage, and Temperance. It will come as no surprise that Trump presents the exact opposite traits from what one would want. Duh-uh. But it is nice to see it spelled out in reference to a classic perspective. This is mostly a been-there, done-that listing of the awfulness of Trump, delineated by type and sub-type of awfulness. Yawn. In a more alarming reference, Anonymous looks at Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom, a right-wing screed which sees in most state intervention in an otherwise unfettered (feral?) economy enslavement by the state. It is much loved by right-wing grad students, the same folks who read Ayn Rand with one hand. But there are some pretty good passages on totalitarianism, which is far likelier from the right than from the left, particularly in the USA. A quote from Hayek and some summaries of Hayek’s points sound just about right re what an aspiring autocrat needs: “He must gain the support of the docile and gullible, who have no strong convictions of their own, but are ready to accept a ready-made system of values if it is only drummed into their ears sufficiently loudly and frequently.”Of course, Hayek goes too far, an autocrat needs a group with questionable morals, which will also tend to be undereducatedSorry, this is pure class bias, presuming as it does that the well-educated, who tend to be wealthier, are of a higher moral character than the poorer, less-well-educated rabble. Are the Kochs well educated? The Republicans in the Senate? The thieves on Wall Street? The CEOs of oil and gas transnationals? If anything, the middle, working and poor classes might be said to be of superior moral quality to those in power, who often seem selected by their degree of disregard for everyone else. The primary benefit to reading A Warning is to get a “you-are-there” sense of just how much of an idiot Trump truly is. A man of unparalleled venality, inflated self-regard, uninterested in learning, believer that all knowledge is to be found inside his tiny brain, a thief, liar, life-long criminal, and legend in his own mind, convinced from birth that rules do not apply to him, and now empowered to surround himself with a rotating cast of sycophants who serve to reflect back to him his vastly inflated sense of his own infallibility. Quoting the Boss, Badlands, Poor man want to be rich. Rich man want to be king. And a king ain't satisfied till he rules everything. Continuing on, King wants to be god. It worked for the Roman emperors. It is not at all shocking that Trump is encouraging the lunatics who proclaim him the second coming. Without, of course, all that messiness on Calvary. Even for those of us who tend to regard him as the epitome of the inherent evil of entitlement-plus-money, it becomes quite clear that those in the asylum with him have a much darker view of his mental competence than the general public. The secondary benefit is to get some detail on how the Madness (or is it criminality?) of King Donald manifests. We can tell when Trump is preparing to ask his lawyers to do something unethical or foolish because that’s when he begins scanning the room for note takers. “What the fuck are you doing?” he shouted at an aide who was scribbling in a notebook during a meeting…His paranoia is the best evidence of a guilty conscience.If you wonder why the man who criticized Obama for playing too much golf spends such an incredible amount of time away from the West Wing, one reason (not to minimize Trump’s aversion to actual work) is that his staff schedules him for as much time as possible out of town to reduce the likelihood of major screw-ups. It is not news that the man made famous for the line “You’re Fired,” on TV is too cowardly to fire anyone in person, preferring to do the job by tweet or by having another underling do the deed. What Anonymous calls The Steady State is comprised of like-minded individuals, die-hard Republicans, who favor GOP policies, but are concerned about the behavior of the president. They do what they can to siderail, dissuade, or ignore presidential wishes that fall afoul of the law, common sense, or human decency (in that order). However, even Anonymous admits that the Resistance in the White House has seen its numbers drop and its hopes fade. Not sure if that means Anonymous is now a lone voice or not, but if resistance to foolishness is a lost cause, what is Anonymous still doing there? Anonymous presents clear Republican ignorance, or dishonesty, certainly bias on many occasions. For example, Anon lauds the wisdom of the founders in choosing a representative rather than a direct democracy, as the mob is too subject to flattery and demagoguery, and will overwhelm more sedate reason. While there certainly is some basis for this concern, this manages to put the responsibility for such danger entirely on the people, ignoring that it is business, the business of Fox News and lobbyists, for example, that create these groundswells, and which the Republican Party has been more than happy to exploit to get its way. He lauds Trump for installing a Stronger conservative bench. The installing of right-wing judges on SCOTUS would have happened under any Republican president, and was made possible in part by Mitch McConnell refusing to bring Obama’s nominee to the Senate, essentially stealing a seat. Great guys, those Republicans. He also lauds the burdensome red tape that has been slashed on his watch, closely matched by the resulting degradation of our environment, which is somehow not mentioned. Add to it the changes to our insane tax code. Oh, you mean adding over a trillion dollars to the federal debt by giving money away to the wealthy and to corporations? Now, that’s crazy. And on it goes. Excerpts from A Warning were released in The Washington Post a few weeks before publication. One highlight was of a possible midnight self-massacre to let the public know of the chaos that reigned in the White House. But they didn’t, did they? Which is a lot like watching Jeff Flake or Susan Collins twisting themselves into pretzels before the cameras to avoid admitting they would toe the party line, only to apply all ten toes to that line when it came time to vote. So, aside from dividing Trump’s lackeys into Sycophants (shirts) and Silent Abettors (skins), how much do we actually learn here? Primarily the value of A Warning is in showing us the depth of the morass, just how venal, just how criminally inclined, just how ignorant, just how egotistical, just how intolerant, just how cruel and mean-spirited, just how resistant to knowledge, and just what an absolutely awful human being Trump is. And to portray a White House staff that has to wonder, every bloody day when they wake up, what has he done now? Yeah, and? A Warning does not really tell us much that we did not already know. It is entertaining (in a dark way) at times, but sometimes also feels loaded with filler. It is not a bad book, but in a world lousy with better books about Trump and books about the issues which Trump has impacted like cruise passengers fed bad sushi, I would look elsewhere. You have been warned. We learned that, given enough time and space, Donald J. Trump will abuse any power he is given. Review first posted – January 10, 2020 Publication date – November 19, 2019 . PS - If we still have a republic after Donald Trump walks out of the Oval, or more likely, is carried out in a body bag after a third or fourth secret heart attack, or, my personal favorite, is frog-marched out of the office in the custody of armed law-enforcement or military officers, we will owe him a debt of gratitude. Donald Trump has given the United States an invaluable lesson. By his total disregard for social, legal, and political norms, by his willingness to thumb his nose at the rule of law, he has shown us where our fault lines lie. He has shown us what can happen if we put a malignant narcissist or even a sociopath into the presidency. And we should use this lesson to construct a stronger union, one that does not rely on the good will of decent people to lead our nation, but enshrines into law mechanisms that assure that another Donald Trump can never again happen here. (As of November 2022, we are still waiting) [image] [image] [image] [image] =============================EXTRA STUFF Items of Interest -----De Officiis by Marcus Tullius Cicero – on Gutenberg -----Springsteen - Badlands ----NY Times – September, 2018 - I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration ----The Road to Serfdom - by Friedrich Hayek -----The Lincoln Project - Bloodlines ----Other Trumpian books worth a look -----Tyrannical Minds by Dean Haycock -----The Plot to Destroy Democ racy by Malcolm Nance -----Fear by Bob Woodward -----Collusion- by Luke Harding -----Trumpocracy by David Frum -----Fire and Fury by Michael Wolff -----Unbelievable by Katy Tur -----The Case for Impeachment by Allan J. Lichtman -----Truth in Our Times by David E. McCraw ...more |
Notes are private!
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Dec 17, 2019
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Dec 29, 2019
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Dec 25, 2019
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Kindle Edition
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1324003316
| 9781324003311
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| 4.07
| 7,719
| Oct 08, 2019
| Oct 08, 2019
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it was amazing
| Yes, the universe wants to kill us. But on the other hand, we all want to live. So let’s find a way together to deflect the asteroids, find the cur Yes, the universe wants to kill us. But on the other hand, we all want to live. So let’s find a way together to deflect the asteroids, find the cure to the next lethal virus, mitigate hurricanes, tsunamis, volcanoes, etc. This can only be enabled by the efforts of a scientifically and technologically literate public. Therein lies a hope on Earth far greater than ever promised by the act of prayer or introspection.It can be a bit of a challenge when talking about Neil deGrasse Tyson, deciding just where to start. Overall, one would have to say that He is the public face of space, this side of fiction, anyway. And speaking of fiction, he was cast in a recent Neal Stephenson novel, SevenEves, albeit with a nom du plume. He has published 14 books, hosted several science-focused TV series, including Cosmos, Star Talk, Origins, the Pluto Files and more. He is only the fifth ever head of the New York Planetarium, served on presidential science advisory councils, has been awarded NASA’s highest non-government-employee award. He is the teacher you wished you had for science, enthusiastic, knowledgeable, and encouraging, and with a wonderful sense of humor. [image] Neil deGrasse Tyson - image from his site And if that is not enough, he is a remarkably charming guy, and a wonderful writer. In a recent Late Show interview with Whoopi Goldberg (at 7:21 of the clip), when Stephen Colbert asked her who her favorite ever guest was, she said Tyson, because he could talk for three hours straight, and they would all be wonderful, informative hours. And if Whoopi loves spending time with the guy, really, who are we to argue? How do you defend yourself when you have received a letter that proclaims you a “pooh-pooh head” for your role in downgrading Pluto to dwarf-planet status? What can you say to people who challenge you on religion, God, philosophy, who see responsibility for the 9/11 assaults in celestial alignments? This book consists of NDT’s responses to about 75 letters he’s received over the years, on a wide range of subjects. He also writes about some personal feelings and events, like his relationship with his father, or more ethereal considerations of nature. And some are just for fun, like his selection of the most scientifically BS movies of all time, or a museum visitor picking up a display information error that had been there for a very long time, and which NDT had had a hand in approving. Oopsy. There are some very heart-warming passages in which he encourages young learners. He opens with a look at his early exposure to NASA, not as the inspiration it was for so many, but as consistent excluder of people like him. He writes a birthday note to NASA, which was born the same month as he was. …you should know that among my colleagues, I am the rare few in my generation who became an astrophysicist in spite of your achievements in space rather than because of them. For my inspiration, I instead turned to libraries, remaindered books on the cosmos from bookstores, my rooftop telescope and the Hayden Planetarium.NASA moved forward in its employee selection with time, and Tyson would serve as an advisor to America’s space agency. He looks at extraordinary claims, the Cosmos, science denial, philosophy, matters of life and death, his experience with 9/11, religious faith, school issues, and parenting. A chapter titled “Rebuttals” is reserved for special smackdowns. Some chapters are more potpourri than focused. There is a fair bit of overlap among the chapters in subject material, but not enough to negate the structure of the book. Some notions are repeated maybe a time or two too often, but that is a small blemish. Tyson, above all, defends science as the way to understand the workings of the world and the universe. And castigates those who would substitute scriptural revealed truths for the objective, testable approach science offers. His correspondents include men, women, children, prisoners, celebrities, folks of diverse political stripes and religious persuasions. He responds to scientists, teachers, athletes, and morons. All with charm, knowledge, and wisdom. The incoming letters are querulous, admiring, and sometimes hate-filled. Tyson offers some surprising observations on things like the value of IQ, the best books to read, and an actual diamond in the sky. He remembers some people he admires. There is occasional snark in his replies, but, IMHO, not nearly enough. He offers a moving message to a fan who is about to lose a dying mother, and tells how Richard Holbrooke’s interest in science informed his diplomatic work. Like Whoopi says, listening to Neil for three hours is perfectly fine, and I expect you will find the time you spend with him in the pages of this book to be just as rewarding. Not only is NDT great at what he does, which is working to educate Americans about science, he is very warm, human company, who is blessed with a gift for explaining science, and an ability to write that smooths that educational element even more. In that interview Stephen Colbert did with Whoopi, she notes that after spending time with Tyson, she remembered more, of the science things he had been talking about, than she’d expected. Maybe you will too. It most certainly won’t hurt to try. And you have any questions, you could always just send the guy a letter. Review first posted – October 4, 2019 Publication date – October 8, 2019 I received an ARC of this book from Norton in return for a review that would stand up to scientific scrutiny. =============================EXTRA STUFF Links to the author’s personal, Twitter and FB pages It would be redundant to add here the vast number of links one could use to connect with Tyson’s various activities. His primary site, at the Planetarium, offers those in abundance. But here's one anyway -----NY Times - April 17, 2021 - Neil deGrasse Tyson Thinks Science Can Reign Supreme Again by David Marchese ...more |
Notes are private!
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Sep 13, 2019
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Sep 20, 2019
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Aug 18, 2019
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Hardcover
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1948226197
| 9781948226196
| 1948226197
| 3.67
| 4,131
| May 07, 2019
| May 07, 2019
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really liked it
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[image] Image from The Adventurists Many of the people I’ll meet on the steppe hold horses as sacred. There are more love songs about horses than a[image] Image from The Adventurists Many of the people I’ll meet on the steppe hold horses as sacred. There are more love songs about horses than about women in Mongolia—for example, ponies come last in races are sung commiseration songs because no one wants them to feel bad. Your horse is an extension of you. A Mongol without a horse is like a bird without wings—goes the proverb. Even horses’ skulls are sacred. They’re made into musical instruments, whose sounds comfort mourning souls.What has 25 legs and covers 1,000 kilometers? Why, the Mongol Derby, of course. Ring any bells? Ummm, me neither. Unless one is particularly attuned to the worlds of equestrian sports or extreme competitions we would be unlikely to have heard of it. Lara Prior-Palmer had heard of it, but had not paid much attention. The entry fee was exorbitant (about $13K US), which led her to expect that she would not be able to even think of attempting it until she was in her thirties, if then. A bored teen, a year out of high school, recently sacked from her au pair gig in Austria, her applications for other adventures producing a resounding silence, she was trolling about for her next thing, whatever might quell the inner buzz that grows louder and louder until it drowns out everything but a way forward, any way forward. She was looking on-line for something to quiet the din, when it reappeared. The passing London underground train shook the building as I leaned into the photograph—long-maned ponies streaming over green steppes, space poured wide and free—in Mongolia. The open-voweled sounds of the word matched the freedom of the country conjured in my mind. I couldn’t place Mongolia in history, nor could I place it on the map.She read on, learning that thirty riders had already signed up, that riders switch ponies every 40 Km, that the race was held in a Pony Express style that recalled Chingiss Khan’s postal system, and that it was deemed “the world’s longest and toughest horse race.” She clicked the box. [image] Lara Prior-Palmer - image from her Amazon page What are the things we might look for in a memoir of this sort? One would hope for a look at an exotic place from a perspective familiar to readers, presuming most readers to be Westerners. Given that it is a sports competition, we would hope for a look at the particulars of this race, what, if anything, sets it apart from other competitions? You’ve gotta figure that a 1,000 kilometer horse race would have to also be a journey of self-discovery, and there is at least some of that in here. Not to say that it was intended. The writing of this book began on the plane ride home to England from Ulaanbaatar, and was intended mostly as a large note-taking effort to better allow Lara to recall the event. Encouraged to expand her 25,000 words to book length by folks to whom she showed her writing, Prior-Palmer did just that, working on the manuscript, off and on, for about five years. It helps if the author can bring some talent, maybe an appreciation of beauty in her writing. [image] A Mongolian ger (yurt) - image from Phys.org Tough to get more exotic than Mongolia for most of us. And while you may be familiar with some of the weather the riders encounter, hot, cold, wind, hail, rain, you have probably not done so while engaged in a grueling horse race. Prior-Palmer fills us in on a host of local details. You will learn of the proper seating arrangements in a Mongolian ger (pronounced ‘gaire’), get a heads up on the proper behavior when encountering an ovoo, (a local shrine consisting of accumulated placed stones, and offerings), and marvel at car parts placed in trees to help gain the assistance of local deities in assuring that the subject vehicle remains in good working order. There are observations on Mongolian history and lore. One local historical figure was Molon Bagsh, an itinerant philosopher who supposedly predicted many of the wonders of the modern age from his perspective in the early 1900s. She offers a bit on the deep respect Mongolians have for their equine partners. One strand of Mongolian philosophy has it that my chest, not my brain, is the seat of my consciousness. It contains my heimori (wind-horse)—an inner creature whose power needs maintaining. When you rub a racehorse’s sweat into your forehead or ride a great, quick pony, you strengthen your heimori and improve your destiny.(You might want to towel off after that.) There are plenty more such, and they are delightful. The race itself occupies most of her consciousness. There is plenty of detail on how it is run, the accommodations, the horses, referred to here almost primarily as ponies. (BTW, to be a horse there is a height bar, 14.2 hands, or about four feet ten inches. Shorter than that, you are a pony. Mongolian equines tend to the shorter end of the bell curve.) The selection process. Which pony to choose? Based on what? Loving the ponies who were eager to fly, but having to cope with some which were far from enthusiastic. The relationships among the riders is pretty significant, particularly Lara’s relationship with an American rider, one Devan Horn, portrayed as a braggadocious Texan, certain that she will prevail. What begins as a bit of competitiveness becomes an all-consuming quest to see to it that this person is denied that victory. Her bonding, or not, with other riders, and non-riders (newspeople, veterinarians, race managers) is an ongoing subject. There are connections made or almost made during the race that highlight interpersonal challenges Lara must resolve, at least temporarily. It is difficult, and not at all necessary, to separate her coping with the race from her dealings with the locals. Riders often stay in the homes of residents, and Lara recalls some charming, as well as clueless interactions. [image] Ponies in waiting - image from The Adventurists Bear in mind that Lara was barely 19 years old when she undertook this adventure. Her age is certainly a factor in her degree of unpreparedness. While a good chunk of who we all are is well set by such an age, it takes plenty more years for the rest of the permanent us to form. What we see here is Lara as a work-in-progress. One element that manifests stronglyis the sort of stiff-upper-lip found in explorers and adventurers. I suppose we think of pain as associated with an event—an accident, for example. We don’t imagine it going on forever. I found no space for pain and its expression in daily life.She is also someone uncomfortable around public feelings. I shiver a little, relieved to be away from Clare. [a rider with whom Lara had spent some time during the competition] I find emotions contagious, swear I can catch them like flu. I’ve always been wary of upset and sickness. Aged seven, I dubbed people crybabies as though it were a life sentence and I winced in repulsion if someone missed school for sickness. I refused to let such a thing happen to me. Although later on I used sickness to save me from school, I still had no empathy for the unwell and the upset. Why would I try to imagine how Clare feels when I’m appalled she’s displayed the emotional hold the Derby has on her. Such is the strangeness of my selfishness.We get some background on family influences that fed her drive. Her Aunt Lucinda was an Olympian, having competed in equestrian events. Her favorite, no nonsense, phrase for just get on with it being “Crack On!” Her grandfather, a military general, was fond of “Just do it.” Firmed up for competition and adventure by such, she was much less able to cope with more emotional challenges. …my real fears aren’t the broken bones or the missing ponies. My real fears are long-term affairs like school, marriage, and jobs. Anything requiring a commitment longer than a ten-day race. Maybe because millions of people manage these commitments, they go unnoticed. Ordinary jobs and relationships—spread over humdrum time—are rarely thought of as brave or strong.And therein, among other such contemplations, is where we find some of the distance that Lara travels personally. Over the course of the book we see some development that maybe Lara herself does not quite perceive. Learning to see things from someone else’s perspective, learning to consider other ways to value things and actions. Her sense of not quite knowing who she is persists. It’s just I haven’t decided if I’m woodland-wild or fireside-tame, and probably never will. But she has certainly gained in building on the self-reflective muscle she finds inside. [image] Lara accepting a congratulatory call after her victory – Devan Horn in the background will have to wait for another chance-image from CNN A pointed element of self-realization is her change from seeing the race as an adventure, hoping mostly just to finish, to feeling the fire of competitiveness that was there all along, and not just to be able to stick it to Devan. There certainly must have been some part of Lara that chose a competitive adventure over the many others that the world offers. And she becomes more aware of that part of herself. She grew up in a culture that scorns overt ambition, and public presentations of self-confidence, so there was plenty of reason for her to suppress or hide her very real competitiveness. We read of sporting victories in the newspapers, but what about all we cannot see? It’s easy to forget the thudded moments of hopelessness involved in a journey, one’s deepest difficulties slowly made clear.In addition to coping with some inner parts of herself undergoing a bit of examination, Prior-Palmer suffered some of the misfortunes that were visited on other contestants: bruises, dehydration, being tossed from her mount, having to get help retrieving it, becoming ill on the (for her) six-day race. And then there were self-imposed problems, being unprepared in sundry ways, like not bringing a map, not getting the recommended vaccinations, never having ridden even a one-day race, let alone one that could last ten days, or not providing for some sanitary needs. There is some contemplative poetic writing in Prior-Palmer’s memoir. Particularly when she writes of her feeling of oneness with her ponies. For two and a half hours my focus is whole. He moves fluently, and I note the quiet warmth of his company. You make no eye contact when riding, but we’re in communication, working a shared form, like shoaling fish. Horses have always been siblings to me, pressing their noses against my back and breathing out winter breath, slowly trusting. From his silence and the morning I draw something, something like strength…Instead of loneliness I feel loveliness. Everything in the hour is familiar. The pony hurries on beneath me, persuading his way into my heart. [image] Image from CNN A thread in the book consists of passages from The Tempest, one of the reading materials she brought with her, to illustrate this or that. The arrival of the storm-driven characters in Shakespeare’s final play, washed clean in a way, pops to mind as she is caught in downpour on the steppe. A passage in which Ariel sings about a sea change in the play connects with Lara feeling transformed while riding a pony she names The Lion. It is a lovely element, but still felt a bit forced. There was plenty going on without it. The book’s title is drawn from The Tempest as well, which seemed workshop-y and less than organic, at first, given that the “rough magic” referred to in the play has to do with the bard’s ability to present fiction as reality. But on further consideration, if we forget the Shakespearean bit for a moment, “Rough” certainly works as a description of the event, and “Magic” is certainly appropriate or the magical ending of the competition, and some of Lara’s perceptions. So, never mind. Since the race, Prior-Palmer, now 24, has been to University and worked on this book in fits and starts. She feels her experience gave her a better ability to consider alternate viewpoints. But she did not feel particularly changed by the race itself at the time. She remained very much who she was, an adventure-seeking, athletic, bright, articulate young woman with a world of possibilities ahead of her and a world-class achievement already in the bag. Review posted – May 31, 2019 Publication date -----May 7, 2019 - hardcover -----April 28, 2020 - Trade paperback ==========In the summer of 2019 GR reduced the allowable review size by 25%, from 20,000 to 15,000 characters. In order to accommodate the text beyond that I have moved it to the comments section directly below. [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
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May 07, 2019
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May 14, 2019
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May 21, 2019
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Hardcover
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0345816773
| 9780345816771
| 0345816773
| 3.88
| 5,583
| Jan 30, 2018
| Jan 30, 2018
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it was amazing
| The end of the road was always just out of sight. Cracked asphalt deepened into night beyond the reach of our headlamps, the thin beams swallowed The end of the road was always just out of sight. Cracked asphalt deepened into night beyond the reach of our headlamps, the thin beams swallowed by the blackness that receded before us no matter how fast we biked. Light was a kind of pavement thrown down in front of our wheels, and the road went on and on. If you ever reach the end, I remember thinking, I’ll fly off the rim of the world. I pedaled harder.Some lights shine brighter. The sky is full of stars, all with their distinct glow, color, and twinkle. But there can be no denying that, as breathtaking as are all the lights we can see after sunset, some call your attention at least a bit more. There are some on which you fixate. Kate Harris is one of those. She burns radiantly with obvious intellectual brilliance, which combines with a broad knowledge of science and humanities, glows with an impressive poetic gift for descriptive language, and is possessed of an incredible store of determination. [image] Lands of Lost Borders is Kate Harris’s telling of a bike trip she took with her from-pre-teen-years bff Melissa Yule. Nothing much, really, just a leisurely jaunt across the Silk Road. Be home in time for dinner, dear. Ten months and ten thousand biking kilometers later, they were. Actually, the journey was broken up into two trips, (so, back in time for lunch?) and took over a year in total. This book focuses on the longer chunk of their ride. I wanted to bike the Silk Road as an extension of my thesis at Oxford: to study how borders make and break what is wild in the world, from mountain ranges to people’s minds, and how science, or more specifically wilderness conservation, might bridge those divides.There is drive and then there is DRIVE!!! Most of us have it in modest quantities, sometimes in spikes, sometimes it barely registers. Mine has been of the spike sort. Finding, on occasion, a target, something that fills or I thought would fill a need, I found the wherewithal to make it happen. One, when I was still a teen, was tracking down a young lass I had seen at a frat party. Another was finding a study abroad program when I was tending to a broken heart, and was looking to heal somewhere far away, a third was plotting a cross country trip in an old Postal truck with a small group of peers. Not exactly riding the Silk Road, but maybe a small taste of the joys to be had when what has been dreamt of crosses the border into reality. Of course, once across that frontier, the new land in which one finds oneself may or may not be what one had imagined. But getting from here to there, setting and accomplishing a goal is a glorious experience. One that I expect all of us have had, to one degree or another. And hopefully one that we all nurture and renew at least somewhat through the course of our lives. There are some people, however, who set their sights slightly higher, sometimes beyond the bell curve, outside the box, off the beaten path. [image] Happiness is a red Hilleberg tent pitched among snowy mountains - Image from Harris’s FB pix The higher we climbed onto the Tibetan Plateau, the better I could breathe. I felt a strange lightness in my legs, an elation of sorts. Each revolution of the pedals took me closer to the stars than I’d ever propelled myself, not that I could see them by day, when the sky was blue and changeless but for a late-morning drift of clouds. The shadows they cast dappled the slopes of mountains like the bottom of a clear stream, so that climbing the pass felt like swimming up towards the surface of something, a threshold or a change of state. Earth to sky, China to Tibet.Harris writes of her early upbringing, hanging with her brothers, moving several times, particularly enjoying remote places. It did not take long for her to set her sights beyond the horizon, well, beyond the planet, actually. She had decided as a teen that she wanted to go to Mars, under the impression that all of her home planet had already been pretty much explored. She gained some notice from the Mars Society after she sent a letter to dozens of world leaders urging them to support a manned (womaned?) mission to the Red Planet. She went on a few Outward Bound adventures, and translated her particular gift for grant writing into third-party funding for projects of various sorts across the world. Toss in an early passion for biology as well. [image] Melissa Yule and Kate Harris - image from Explore-mag.com Harris and Yule had been teaming up for sundry adventures since they were classmates as pre-teens. Science fair projects eventually gave way to other pursuits. They ran in the NYC marathon, on a whim, according to their bios in CyclingSilk.com. Who does that? These two, apparently. They also biked across the USA in 2005 and rode bikes across Tibet and Xinjiang in 2006. (the earlier piece of the Silk Road trip.) I guess they were just getting warmed up. In 2011, three Masters degrees between them later, Harris’s from Oxford and MIT, they combined their endurance-athlete inclinations, a permanent desire for adventure, and an interest in protecting imperiled landscapes and ways of life to try to ride the entire Silk Road, or at least as much as was possible, beyond what they had already ridden. Some borders are real, though, defended by people with guns, and require one to set off in an unplanned direction. So, there were interludes that had them on trucks, buses, trains, and planes. Longing on a large scale,” says novelist Don DeLillo, “is what makes history.” And longing on a smaller scale is what sends explorers into the unknown, where the first thing they do, typically, is draw a map.There are passages throughout the book on nature conservation, and the irrelevance of political borders to biological realities, but I got the feeling that this was far secondary to the ecstasy of adventuring. It seemed to me that Kate’s prodigious talent at writing grant applications, and no doubt Mel’s as well, had secured necessary funding (a $10K grant, plus considerable other support) for their odyssey, but reporting on conservation along the ride, while constituting the labor required to justify the grant, was something less than a passion. ( I was smitten with wildness, and only incidentally with science.) Of course, it could be that Harris and Yule’s reports back to their sponsors on the more scientific details of the pair’s extended field trip was the channel for most of that material. This book focuses on the adventure of exploration and, remaining true to the title, a consideration of borders, literal and figurative. [image] From Harris’s Facebook pages The more I learned about the South Caucasus, with its closed borders and warring enclaves, the more the place seemed like a playground game of capture-the-flag turned vicious, all in the dubious name of nationalism. And yet political fortunes, while sometimes solid as brick, are finally only as strong as shared belief.Harris provides spot-by-spot descriptions of the places through which they travel. She notes the sorts of things you would expect, the landscape, the architecture, the weather, the physical conditions of the area, the traffic, the colors and textures, the friendliness (or not) of the locals and the pair’s interactions with them. The history of the places they traverse comes in for a bit of a look. The origins of the word “Tibet,” for example, a consideration of whether Marco Polo actually traveled as far as he claimed, and disappointment that his motivation was solely mercantile and not exploratory. One source of inspiration was an intrepid female explorer from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Fanny Bullock Workman, a mountaineer and explorer also fond of the bicycle. this particular stretch of salt and wind, nearly uninhabited and widely dismissed as a wasteland, is one of the most contested territories in Asia. Tibetan by cultural heritage, Indian by treaty claim, and Chinese by possession, the Aksai Chin is caught in this territorial tug-of-war owing to its strategic location between nations. It all began when China furtively build a road across it in 1957, the very dirt track we were on, roping like a slow-burning fuse for more than 1,600 kilometres over the emptiness of the plateau. India only clued in to Highway 219’s existence half a decade later, and their discovery detonated a war over the borderland.[image] image from NatureNeedsHalf.org She fills us in on some of the logistical challenges involved, the hurdles to be jumped in getting the correct papers to cross from here to there, the difficulty of communicating when there is no common language, the struggle to find food, water and shelter, replacements for lost or broken pieces of this or that. One surprise was the absence of any reports of serious sexual predation, although she does report on the need to move quickly at times to evade potential unpleasantness. There are several reports of wonderful, warm experiences, as locals take the pair under their wings for a meal and a warm place to sleep. They are even joined for a time by a stray dog, and are swarmed by a herd of Tibetan antelope. Anyone can recognize wildness on the Tibetan Plateau; the challenge is perceiving it in a roadside picnic area in Azerbaijan.Harris’s telling is not just the travelogue of seeing this, then that, but includes ongoing philosophical meanderings, about her own experiences and the wider human variety, about not only the political borders with which people must contend, but personal edges, where they begin and end, or don’t. Her intellectual explorations are bolstered by a rich trove of quotes from literary classics, both prose and poetry, and from some of the authors you would expect, like Thoreau and Muir, Wallace, Darwin, and Carl Sagan. But finally, it is Harris’s gift for language that elevates this book to Himalayan heights. Combining intellectual heft with an inquiring mind is amazing enough, but to be able to communicate both the inner and outer journeys with such sensitivity and beauty is a rare accomplishment indeed. After being on an achievement bender most of my life, the prospect of withdrawal, of doing anything without external approval, or better yet acclamation, kept me obediently between the lines I couldn’t even recognize as lines. Isn’t that the final, most forceful triumph of borders? They make us accept as real and substantial what we can’t actually see?[image] image from NatureNeedsHalf.org I would not want you get through this review without at least a few roadblocks. I really wanted for each chapter to include a map of the travels contained therein. There is a map provide at the beginning, but chapter-by-chapter additions would have been most welcome. I would have liked a bit more science in the book, even if it added a fair number of pages to the total. A quibble. I wonder, though, if Harris was aware of the issues faced by Fanny Bullock Workman, who also wrote of her travels, having greater popular success with work that focused more on the travel than the scientific findings. Whether buttressed with dirt roads or red tape, barbed wire or bribes, the various walls of the world have one aspect in common: they all posture as righteous and necessary parts of the landscape.This is not your summer trip to Europe. You will not be familiar with most of the places these two riders visit. The larger entities, sure, country names, some mountain ranges, but most of the local place names will be unfamiliar. Part of the fun of reading this book is that it sends you off on a journey of discovery of your own, looking up this town, that river, or an unheard-of plain or valley. In this, the book very much succeeds in sparking a bit of the exploratory impulse in most readers. You may or may not want to schedule a trip to many of the places she notes, but you will definitely want to learn more about them. The true risks of travel are disappointment and transformation: the fear you’ll be the same person when you go home, and the fear you won’t. Then there’s the fear, particularly acute on roads in India, that you won’t make it home at all.[image] image from Explore Magazine – shot by Kate Harris It may be grueling, surprising, filled with up and downs, demoralizing, exhilarating, exciting, stunningly beautiful, and rich with landscape, exterior and interior. Lands of Lost Borders may not wear out your arms or legs, your back, or any other muscle group, (ok, maybe the muscles that control your eyes) but it will stimulate your mind, lift up your spirit, and stimulate your need to pedal through darkness into knowing. Lands of Lost Borders is a stunning literary memoir you will not soon forget. Exploration, more than anything, is like falling in love: the experience feels singular, unprecedented, and revolutionary, despite the fact that others have been there before. No one can fall in love for you, just as no one can bike the Silk Road or walk on the moon for you. The most powerful experiences aren’t amenable to maps. Review posted – April 6, 2018 Publication date – August 21, 2018 =============================EXTRA STUFF Links to the author’s personal, Twitter and FB pages Melissa Yule’s Twitter page. Yule holds a Master’s degree in International Development from the University of Guelph. Her interests include community development and environmental science. Here is her profile on the CyclingSilk.com site. There is a lot of information available at Cycling Silk. I strongly advise you to check out the site. A brief (11:43) video of their trip In case you missed the link in the body of the review, it is worth checking out Fanny Bullock Workman, one of Harris’s heroes. The Golden Record – it was sent on the Voyager mission to let far-away civilizations know we are here. Harris talks about it a fair bit at one point in the book [image] What’s on it - image from Wiki The Harper Book Queen included a bit on this book in her TBR Tuesdays FB live broadcast from 8/21/18 - at 11:47 Interviews -----The Globe and Mail - In a tiny B.C. cabin, Kate Harris penned tales of travel along the Silk Road - by Marsha Lederman - 2/15/18 -----Explore Magazine - The Way of the Wolf: Lands of Lost Borders, With Author Kate Harris What was the hardest part of the journey?[image] The Harris Mansion - image from the Globe and Mail article 400 sq ft of paradise in Atlin, B.C. suits the author just fine. Not surprising that she is comfy in what most of us might consider roughing-it quarters. She is a descendant of William Clark, of Lewis and Clark fame. Sorry, I could not help it. There were just so many quotes from the book that I wanted to use. But it was not possible to fit them all in. So off we go to EXTRA EXTRA STUFF right below here in Comment #1 ...more |
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0241976871
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it was amazing
| I’m a liar…born to lying, bred to it, trained to it by an industry that lies for a living, practiced in it as a novelist. As a maker of fictions, I’m a liar…born to lying, bred to it, trained to it by an industry that lies for a living, practiced in it as a novelist. As a maker of fictions, I invent versions of myself, never the real thing, if it exists.John le Carré spent several years as an intelligence officer, with both MI6 and MI5. When his third novel, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, became an international best-seller, he retired from being a spook to writing about them full time. John le Carré (“Le Carré” means “The Square,” btw) is the nom de plume of one David John Moore Cornwell. As he began his writing while still in the cloak and dagger biz, his employers required him to assume an alias for his writing work. [image] John Le Carré - from CBC At the time The Pigeon Tunnel was released Le Carré had written 21 books, mostly fiction. He has subsequently released two more novels. This is his only memoir. He has also dipped into writing short stories, and has written three screenplays. Ten of his books have been made into films, and several more into productions for television. Le Carré is the best writer of spy fiction of his time, offering not only a look into craft and the mindset of those in the field, but a very adult contemplation of the moral ambiguities that are a part and parcel of spy-work. Even when Bond-villain sorts take the stage they are surrounded by layers of ambiguity in which national interests easily triumph personal morality. But even with the odds against them, le Carre’s characters struggle to do the right thing in a wrong world. He started out writing about the Cold War, but, with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the dissolution of the Soviet Union, he looked further afield for conflict areas. There was no shortage. The book is a sort-of memoir. If you are looking for Le Carré’s life story, this is certainly not the place to plant your listening devices. In fact, an actual biography, written with the cooperation of the subject, was released less than a year prior to this one, John le Carré: The Biography, by Adam Sisman. Sisman is rather peeved, actually, that Le Carré wrote and released his own, uncomfortably (for him) close to the one Sisman had written. If this beef interests you, I recommend checking out this item in The Guardian, John le Carré and I worked for years on his biography. Why is he telling his own story 12 months later?. [image] Richard Burton in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold - from Britannica.com The Pigeon Tunnel is comprised of about three dozen small tales, usually ones that illuminate one or more of his books. They sometimes read like short stories, but the general gist is here’s where I got the inspiration for this or that person in this or that book. Another thread addresses his relationship with family. Sometimes the two threads become entwined. There is a fellow who permeates the book and is the source of several of the more moving tales. Think of him standing in a doorway on a misty evening, smoke rising to join the gray air. Think of him sitting in your hotel, slowly turning the pages on the international edition of a newspaper whose name you would know. Maybe he is sitting in a room across the way, glassing the street as you come and go, or in a van listening to the conversation in your room. His name is Ronnie and we will leave him to the shadows for now. Le Carré makes his excuses in the Introduction These are true stories told from memory—to which you are entitled to ask, what is truth, and what is memory to a creative writer in what we may delicately call the evening of his life? To the lawyer, truth is facts unadorned. Whether such facts are ever findable is another matter. To the creative writer, fact is raw material, not his taskmaster but his instrument, and his job is to make it sing. Real truth lies, if anywhere, not in facts, but in nuance.So one is free to take these stories with the same shaker of salt you would use with any world-renowned raconteur in a quiet corner of a late-night watering hole. [image] Alec Guinness as George Smiley - from NPR He writes of his time in the intelligence services, first recruited as little more than a child. Of course, he is not allowed to spy and tell, so these are mostly stories of when he was assigned as a minder to this or that person or group visiting London. They tend to have a comedic, or at least ironic cast. Sometimes the details exposed are harder-edged. One thing is certain. Le Carre believes in getting on-the-ground touch-and-feel for his stories. The most fascinating experiences here recall visits to sites he intended to use in a novel, where he wanted to flesh out his take on the scenery, and seek out real-life versions of the characters he already had in mind. He was hoping to pick up some telling details of the lives those people led with which to give his characters a bit more realism. This field work included meetings with people of wildly diverse sorts, from real-life heroes and heroines to world leaders to gangsters, Nobel Prize winners, terrorists, a fair helping of spies and a parrot in a Lebanese Hotel that has a talent that will make you howl with laughter. He lets drop some of the rather stunning things he has heard, and offers up some surprises. I have met two former heads of the KGB in my life and I liked them both.In one tale he tells of meeting a man who was the very image of a character he had written about in a novel, as if the guy had come into corporal existence directly from the page. [image] Tom Hiddleston in The Night Manager - image from Indiewire.com In the later life of his books, le Carre tells of some of his dealings with directors. It is, for the most part, not a pretty picture. More interesting are his encounters with some of the performers in those productions. He leaves a trail of dropped names that would be the envy of any writer, journalist, or paparazzo. And tells of how he had frequently been mistaken for someone who knows about spying and is still connected to it many years after he had parted ways with the secret agencies. In the old days it was convenient to bill me as a spy turned writer. I was nothing of the kind. I am a writer who, when I was very young, spent a few ineffectual but extremely formative years in British Intelligence.Now, as for that guy in the corner, the one pretending to read a guidebook, the one who has been there for the entirety of the book, that would be Ronnie. Le Carre did not spring fully-formed from the earth, an Oxford student, educated, brilliant, well-spoken, discrete, multilingual. He came from somewhere. The largest part of that somewhere is dad. Ronnie was, according to his son, and sundry houses of detention, a con-man. How having Ronnie for a father affected the author is a major piece of the overall story. There are some skills one learns at the feet of a criminal, and maybe some talents one inherits. Some compensation I suppose for having a parent one cannot rely on, a parent one might be mortified to be associated with. [image] Ralph Fiennes and Rachel Weisz in The Constant Gardener - image from Into Film You do not have to have read any of le Carré’s novels to appreciate this book. It is certainly interesting and entertaining enough on its own. But, come on, really, why would you even be thinking of reading this if you had not read some of his books, or, at the very least, seen at least some of the film or TV presentations of his work? It is no secret that le Carré is a master of his craft. The Pigeon Tunnel is a huge treat for readers of his fiction. It offers bits of origin story, both for the books and the characters in them, and for le Carré himself. You do not have to be a master of deception, expert at Moscow rules, or an agent of the single, double, or triple variety to fill in some of the gaps in your knowledge of LeCarre’s oeuvre. The intel in this book will certainly be of value to any who have encountered his work. A copy has been left for you at a nearby bookstore. You know the one. You have the experience needed to figure out how to retrieve the package. Report back as soon as you have secured the parcel and are in a secure location. Review first posted – 9/23/16 Publication date – 9/6/16 =============================EXTRA STUFF Links to the author’s personal and FB pages. While there is plenty of information at these, do not expect to interact with the writer. He has passed that task on to his staff, the better to concentrate his efforts on writing his next book. A piece by the author for The Guardian - John le Carré on The Night Manager on TV: they’ve totally changed my book – but it works In case you missed it in the review, his biographer’s gripe at the competition - John le Carré and I worked for years on his biography. Why is he telling his own story 12 months later?. A 2014 David Denby article in The New Yorker - WHICH IS THE BEST JOHN LE CARRÉ NOVEL? - definitely worth a look George Plimpton interviewed JlC for The Paris Review in 1997. It is delicious. August 25, 2017 - NY Times - A fun read. Macintyre is also a former spook of a writer. - Spies Like Us: A Conversation With John le Carré and Ben Macintyre - by Sarah Lyallaug Although I have read a fair number of JlCs books, and seen films for some of the books I have missed, I have read and reviewed only one during my years on GR, A Most Wanted Man October 11, 2019 - The Guardian - 'My ties to England have loosened': John le Carré on Britain, Boris and Brexit - by John Banville ...more |
Notes are private!
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Sep 11, 2016
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Sep 20, 2016
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Sep 11, 2016
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Paperback
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0062458191
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| 3.71
| 13,270
| Jun 28, 2016
| Jun 28, 2016
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really liked it
| …technology entrepreneurs are society’s chaos monkeys, pulling the plug on everything from taxi medallions (Uber) to traditional hotels (AirBnB) to …technology entrepreneurs are society’s chaos monkeys, pulling the plug on everything from taxi medallions (Uber) to traditional hotels (AirBnB) to dating (Tinder). One industry after another is simply knocked out via venture-backed entrepreneurial daring and hastily shipped software. Silicon Valley is the zoo where the chaos monkeys are kept, and their numbers only grow in time. With the explosion of venture capital, there is no shortage of bananas to feed them. The question for society is whether it can survive these entrepreneurial chaos monkeys intact, and at what human cost.If you want to learn about sex you will get a lot more useful intel from a hooker than you would from a nun (hopefully). If you want to learn about what life is like in Silicon Valley, you would do well to let to someone who has done the deed and lived the life show you the way. Antonio Garcia Martinez is our Virgil through a dark landscape where every great fortune is founded on a great crime, where morality is not only violated, but where its very existence is not recognized, where millionaires are a dime a dozen and where any sort of social consciousness is kept nicely sedated, a place where greed is king, fast is worshipped to the exclusion of better, and death is always at the door. [image] Antonio Garcia Martinez - from Money.cnn.com Martinez has the cred to offer the tour. Having toiled as a quant at that paragon of virtue, Goldman Sachs, he eventually found life on The Street less than fully rewarding. He says that quants at Goldman were mostly failed scientists like me who had sold out to the man and suddenly found themselves, after making it through years of advanced relativity and quantum mechanics, with a golf-club-wielding gorilla called a trader peering over their shoulder asking them where their risk report was. We were quantitative enablers, offering the new and shiny blessings of modern computation to the old business of buying and selling… quants were the eunuchs at the orgy. The fluffers on the porn set of high finance. We were the ever-present British guy in every Hollywood World War II film: there to add a touch of class and exotic sophistication, but not really consequential to the plot (except perhaps to conveniently take some bad guy’s bullet.)As someone with pretty high end analytical and programming skills, he saw (or says he saw, who knows?) the impending meltdown in the 2007 financial world, and opportunities in the new frontier out west, so traded The Street for The Valley, taking a chance on a job on the other coast. The book follows Garcia’s chronological trail from startup to finish, from employee to entrepreneur, to buy-out target, to middle-manager at a monster Valley corporation to…well, you’ll see, if you read the book, or just Google the guy. It is a well-worn trail, but not for you or me, most likely. So a tour guide is definitely called for. And Martinez is nothing if not an informative and eager cicerone through what can be a very dark and sulphurous place. Of course, there is plenty of that brimstone stench emanating from the author, an indication of just how well he fit in. anyone who claims the Valley is meritocratic is someone who has profited vastly from it via nonmeritocratic means like happenstance, membership in a privileged cohort, or some concealed act of skullduggery. Since fortune had never been on my side, and I had no privileged cohort to fall back on, skullduggery it would have to be.It does not seem like it was out of character for AGM to engage in a bit of back-stabbing, double-dealing, and multiple instances of self-serving justification for his various dark deeds. When he talks about his income and net worth, for instance, which would be a pretty sweet take for most of us, yet regarding it as subsistence level, one might be forgiven for gleefully imagining Martinez in his thirty-seven-foot sailboat having a very unfriendly encounter with a pod of large, angry, breaching sperm whales. He offers an entertaining, if sometimes off-putting, alarming, even rage-inducing account of his experiences, offering many a word to the wise, or at least the ambitious, on how deals are made, how organizations are structured, and how to interpret some of the observables you might see. He is incisive and funny, and has a wicked way with words. I have added a selection of quotes as part of the EXTRA STUFF bit at the bottom of the review. You will definitely see what I mean. And he demonstrates quite a gift for selecting absolutely fabulous quotes to introduce most chapters. Martinez covers the highs and lows of the struggle to rise up in The Valley. This includes the ABCs of doing a startup, getting funding, how to divide your equity for the most efficient operation, handling media to get the most buzz for your launch, researching the people you will be dealing with, and, if things go well, negotiating with the bigger blobs that want to absorb your company. One revelation was that acquisition of startups by the big players is just a higher-ticket form of HR recruiting. There are worse ways of monetizing sociopathy than startups. If you know any better ways, I’m listening.For policy wonks, you will learn about the H-1B sort-of immigration program that brings thousand of foreign workers to American jobs in a form of high-end indentured servitude. Martinez offers a peek inside the operations of Twitter and Facebook, which is either entertaining or depressing, depending. But every company has its own culture, and AGM has a keen eye for the differences, and an analyst’s talent for examining structure. His take on large corporations functioning like nation-states, to the point of exchanging what are essentially diplomats, adds definite texture to the notion of corporations as the trans-national entities they truly are. Worse, he points out not only how corporations are like religion, but how, in that, they are very like the cult-world of some communist nations. There are a few things that made this less than an entirely effervescent read. First, while part of his story line was how he worked towards installing a particular form of ad-revenue generation at FB, the details tended to get in the way of the overall picture. Office politics are nothing new, even in this bubbly narrative. Second, while AGM is obviously an uber-bright guy, with a keen mind for some things, and a talent for writing, he comes across as (and probably is) someone with the soul of a slave-trader. If you can hold your nose at his unnecessary tales of sexual adventure, his willingness to endanger the lives of regular folks with childish antics, and his casual acquaintance with ethical standards, there is much to be gleaned in Chaos Monkeys. It is a look at the sausage factory, a peep-show of how Review Posted - August 19, 2016 Publication date – June 28, 2016 =============================EXTRA STUFF Links to the author’s personal, Twitter and FB pages August 24, 2016 - A really interesting NY Times Magazine article on how FB has become a very large kahuna in the delivery of political ads - Inside Facebook’s (Totally Insane, Unintentionally Gigantic, Hyperpartisan) Political-Media Machine - by John Hermann ==================================QUOTES -----196 - humans, even at the rarified heights of the economic elite, are in truth scared, needy children playing at dress-up and pretending to be grown-ups -----324 - Here’s what people don’t understand about advertising. Facebook is simply a routing system, almost like an old-time telephone exchange, that delivers a message for money. The address on that message can be approximate (e.g. males aged thirty five in Ohio), or it can be specific (e.g., the person who just shopped for a specific pair of shoes on Zappos). But either way, Facebook didn’t make the match of user and messenger, and at most decides secondary things like how often the ad is seen in general, or which of two ads addressed to you is seen that particular instant. In this sense, ads on Facebook are no different from phone calls or emails. -----355 - At their extremes, capitalism and communism become equivalent: Endless toil motivated by lapidary ideals handed down by a revered and unquestioned leader, and put into practice by a leadership caste selected for its adherence to aforementioned principles, and richly rewarded for its willingness to grind whatever human grist the mill required? Same in both A (mostly) pliant media that flatters the existing system of production, framing it as the only such system possible? Check! Foot soldiers who sacrifice their families and personal lives for the efficient running of the system, and who view their sole human value through the prism of advancement within that system? Welcome to the People’s Republic of Facebook. But one can simply quit a job in capitalism, while from communism there is no escape, you’ll protest. As for the actual ability to opt out under capitalism: look at Seattle or SF real estate prices, and the cost of a decent US education, and consider whether Amazon or Facebook employees could really opt out of their treadmill I’ve never known one who did, and I’ve known many. Ask your average family providers, even those in a two-income family, whether they felt they could simply quit when they liked. They could barely get a few weeks off when they had a child, much less opt out. Switching jobs would amount to nothing more than changing the color of the shackles. ... The reality is that capitalism, communism and every other sweeping ideology feed off the same human drives—the founder’s or revolutionary’s narcissistic will to power, and the mass man’s desire to be part of something bigger than himself—even if with very different outcomes...yoking together the monomaniac’s twitchy urge and the follower’s hunger for a role in some captivating story. -----359 – What was intriguing was how the unwealthy embraced the system, even if they weren’t the beneficiaries of this new social order we’d all joined. The junior hire was sucked along by enthusiasm and cluelessness, but the more senior employees at the middle-manager level knew the score. They knew that they lived one lifestyle, but their old-timer supervisor, who wasn’t necessarily more talented, lived very much another. This was a textbook case of the Marxist argument that capitalists instill the values of the property owners into their managerial classes, while still keeping most of the fruits of labor, in order to make common cause against the exploited proletariat, even though manager and worker have more in common than either does with the senior leadership. ...more |
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Jul 08, 2016
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Jul 22, 2016
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3.75
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really liked it
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Mar 18, 2024
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3.62
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it was amazing
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Jan 11, 2024
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3.47
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it was amazing
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May 22, 2023
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May 23, 2023
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4.36
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really liked it
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Jan 10, 2023
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4.12
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it was amazing
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Nov 29, 2022
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3.80
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it was amazing
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Oct 31, 2022
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3.75
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really liked it
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Apr 25, 2022
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Apr 25, 2022
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4.05
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really liked it
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Feb 20, 2022
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3.66
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really liked it
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Feb 22, 2021
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Mar 03, 2021
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4.14
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it was amazing
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3.73
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it was amazing
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Jan 04, 2021
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Dec 10, 2020
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3.82
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it was amazing
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Sep 05, 2020
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4.26
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it was amazing
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Jun 05, 2020
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3.50
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May 24, 2020
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3.93
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liked it
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Dec 29, 2019
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Dec 25, 2019
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4.07
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it was amazing
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3.67
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really liked it
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3.88
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it was amazing
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Mar 29, 2018
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Mar 29, 2018
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4.06
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it was amazing
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Sep 20, 2016
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Sep 11, 2016
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3.71
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really liked it
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Jul 22, 2016
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Jul 08, 2016
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