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0374601801
| 9780374601805
| 0374601801
| 4.00
| 1,915
| Aug 22, 2023
| Aug 22, 2023
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liked it
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The 28th president of Harvard University, Drew Gilpin Faust was the first woman and the first Southerner in the job. She had a relatively long tenure,
The 28th president of Harvard University, Drew Gilpin Faust was the first woman and the first Southerner in the job. She had a relatively long tenure, 2007-2018, given the way things are going now. This memoir outlines her family's family and "how she got to be that way," but what it really does is show how she sprung singular from the head of Athena, the war goddess. It seems Faust was always destined to fight against the strictures and unfairnesses she observed from her place in restricted White southern society. But her way of telling the story chafed. Perhaps it is because I am nearly her age and I ache to think no one was able to break down the barriers behind which her mother hid before her early death. Faust is smart, well-educated and articulate but she chafes, knowing so much. She ends her memoir at the time of her graduation from college. One presumes she went on to honors and studying history. I remember when she was chosen to lead Harvard--I was impressed and proud, being a woman myself. I admire what she was able to do but I don't have to like her, do I? ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jan 03, 2024
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Jan 04, 2024
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Jan 04, 2024
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Hardcover
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1250220149
| 9781250220141
| 1250220149
| 4.39
| 5,396
| Jul 26, 2018
| Nov 05, 2019
|
really liked it
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For those who find animal emotions and inter-species friendships absorbing, this is a wonderful story about the ways rhinos, hippos, and elephants con
For those who find animal emotions and inter-species friendships absorbing, this is a wonderful story about the ways rhinos, hippos, and elephants connect with each other and with humans. Françoise Malay-Anthony was wife to the original Elephant Whisperer himself, Lawrence Anthony, who wrote a book of that name with famed nature-writer Graham Spence about his experiences creating an animal preserve in South Africa, called Thula Thula. At first Thula Thula was simply a preserve for herds of elephants whose habitat was disappearing. Soon it became apparent that poaching of elephant tusks and rhino horns was leaving vulnerable and traumatized babies to fend for themselves in dangerous territory. Thula Thula gradually became known for emergency treatment of large animals prematurely separated from their mothers. A dedicated team of young volunteers from around the world worked hard to save endangered rhinos and baby elephants abandoned by their herd. Leadership for this turn in the direction of Thula Thula, also a game reserve with hotel and bush drives for tourists to bring in money, came at the instigation of Françoise Malby-Anthony after the death of her husband, a time when she was anxious about managing the property without the extraordinary skills her husband possessed. We learn of her vulnerability in light of world-class scam artists who sought to divert from her goal to make the environment better for animals in the wild. Her education in the ways of the wild—the wild world of tusk and horn poaching—is painful. The viciousness of poaching by unscrupulous actors with enormous cash reserves has changed the entire focus of those in Africa seeking to preserve large animal habitat and populations. Trained security has had to devise ingenious methods of divining poachers plans and methods. This change in focus from trying to create a nurturing environment to defending territory and wildlife against indescribable violence is a disheartening change and a difficult way to live. Compare those horrors with a young male elephant seeking the limelight—turning his rump to a jeep full of camera-toting watchers and twerking for the crowd. And an exploration of the character of rhino surprises readers utterly for what it tells us of their fearfulness and gentleness. We likewise meet a hippo initially very suspicious of being asked to step into a green wading pool with a scant amount of water. We meet the handlers who become these distressed animals’ best buddies, teaching them to play despite their trauma, and protecting them as best they can from the nightmares that plague them. If readers enjoy the stories in this book, one absolutely must make an attempt to locate a copy of The Elephant Whisperer referenced above because of what it adds in richness to the story and the description of the environment and told by a world-class raconteur. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Oct 23, 2019
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Nov 03, 2019
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Oct 23, 2019
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Hardcover
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0996110410
| 9780996110419
| B0129BHRD0
| 4.11
| 198
| Jan 01, 2015
| Jul 21, 2015
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really liked it
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You’re probably going to think a free memoir isn’t much—not interesting, not well-written, not worth bothering with. I picked it up at a conference no
You’re probably going to think a free memoir isn’t much—not interesting, not well-written, not worth bothering with. I picked it up at a conference not knowing it was a memoir, actually. It sat around my house cluttering things until I decided to throw it out—but not until I glanced through it first. Well, much later the same day it is all revolving in my head, leaving me feeling wonder, awe, thunderstruck surprise, joy, awe again. This is one helluva story, a creation story. a bildungsroman, an odyssey. And our hero—yes, emphatically, hero—emerges an adult, a moral adult caring about his fellow humans. His fellow humans care about him as well. He is not bitter, or cynical, or any one of the things that lesser people may experience along the dark and scary road that can be our lives. His life surely trumps that of most of us, simply in terms of size: he is 6’9” and was down to 145 pounds at the height of his death-defying illness. Since he tell us of his illness in the first pages, I am not giving away the story. No. That honor is still reserved for him because the bad things that happen are not really, ever, the story. It is what we did after that. And what Jim Gilliam did was to grab every bit of life he had left and use it. By then he had discovered that God was not to be found in some cold pile of cathedral rocks somewhere or in the thundering denunciations of false prophets on TV but within all of us, most especially when we are together, caring for one another. He calls that search and finding connection a holy experience, and he is not wrong. Gilliam is a technologist, and as such, one would expect his skills would not lie in writing. But this book, even if he had help, is beautifully done, full of moment, real insight, propulsion, and discovery. In a way, it is the tale of every man, though not every man has gotten there yet. He will describe the moment he discovers falseness in the lessons taught him by his religious teachers, the moment the world begins to unravel around his family, the moment he discovers he must, no matter what, follow his own path to understanding. What is so appealing about this journey is that Gilliam is guileless. He is not trying to teach us anything. He is explaining his journey, what he saw, and tells us what he thinks about what he saw. It is utterly fascinating because he has so much understanding of the events in his life. Gilliam’s father and mother both were math majors and computer scientists of sorts in the computer field's early days. For business reasons his father lost an opportunity to develop one of the first software programs for personal computers at IBM and consequently turned to fundamentalist religion. Gilliam grew up steeped in the language and an understanding of what computers could do, but was restricted from taking full advantage by the religiosity of his parents. He himself was very good at thinking like a scientist and took advanced classes while in high school so that he could enter college as a sophomore. The hill separating him from his intellectual development became steeper just as he was finishing high school. I am not going to spoil the story arc. At no point did this 180-page small format paperback every become weighted down with intent or causation. We just have the clean progression of one boy into man into—that word again—hero. His understanding that there is something godly in human connection, in striving together for good, is exactly what people discover in moments of human happiness and fulfillment. While he rejected the morality in which he was raised, as I did, I wonder if somehow it wasn’t good preparation for recognizing morality when he saw it, finally. Personally, I can’t think of a more absorbing, unputdownable story. Get it if you can. It is a wonderful, thought-provoking personal history. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Aug 04, 2019
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Aug 04, 2019
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Aug 04, 2019
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Kindle Edition
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0316489646
| 9780316489645
| 0316489646
| 3.70
| 254
| May 14, 2019
| May 14, 2019
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it was amazing
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Justice John Paul Stevens appears to me to be one of those old-timey conservatives, the kind whose judgment I may not agree with but whose opinions I
Justice John Paul Stevens appears to me to be one of those old-timey conservatives, the kind whose judgment I may not agree with but whose opinions I can respect. It’s been awhile since I’ve seen such clear thinking on the part of anyone who calls themselves Republican. Stevens served on the Supreme Court thirty-four years, from 1975-2010. He did an awful lot of deciding in all that time; what I notice most is that these decisions, or at least the ones he discusses in detail, are ones that made a big difference in the life of ordinary Americans. We all knew the Supreme Court was important, but how quickly the perception of partisanship has begun to erode their power. Stevens names time periods in the court for the newest member because that individual alters the balance of power. He discusses important decisions each new justice has authored that might be considered to define that justice’s body of work and places his own assents or dissents beside them. One of the earliest discussions he wades into is the abortion debate. Stevens was seated two years after Roe v. Wade and says at the time the decision had no appearance of being controversial. Criticism of Roe became more widespread perhaps in part because opponents repeatedly make the incorrect argument that only a “right to privacy,” unmentioned in the Constitution, supported the holding. Correctly basing a woman’s right to have an abortion in "liberty" rather than “privacy" should undercut that criticism.Just so. The 2003 case involving a challenge to the constitutionality of Pennsylvania’s 2002 congressional districting map, Vieth v. Jubelirer, is close to my heart. Hearing Stevens articulate why deciding partisan gerrymanders are not a heavy lift gives succor to like-minded in light of the devastation of a final refusal by SCOTUS to hear any more such cases. Why is it any more difficult than deciding a racial gerrymander, he asks. Why can’t the Court stipulate every district boundary have a neutral justification? There are no lack of judicially manageable standards; there is a lack “judicial will to condemn even the most blatant violations of a state legislature’s fundamental duty to govern impartially.” Stevens remained puzzled by his failure to convince his colleagues on the Court of his argument, an early echo of Justice Kagan’s distress this year that the blatant partisanship of the Court has broken out into the open and split the harmony with which they argued for so many years. Stevens does not leave out decisions he wrote that were disliked by the country. Time never disguised the ugly truth that in Kelo v. The City of New London , a multinational pharmaceutical corporation looking around for a new development used the notion of eminent domain to take the homes of two long-time residents of New London, and then, within five years, closed up shop and left town. “…the Kelo majority opinion was rightly consistent with the Supreme Court’s precedent and the Constitution’s text and structure [but] Whether the decision represented sound policy is another matter.” After the Citizen’s United decision with which he disagreed, Stevens tendered his resignation. “…it is perfectly clear that if the identity of a speaker cannot provide the basis for regulating his (or its) speech, the majority’s rationale in Citizen’s United would protect not only the foreign shareholders of corporate donors to political campaigns but also foreign corporate donors themselves.”By hardly ever mentioning fellow Justice Sam Alito Stevens shows his animus. After this decision, Stevens describes Alito sitting in the audience during Obama’s State of the Union. When Obama mentioned that the decision allows foreign corporations to have a say in American elections, Stevens writes Alito “incorrectly” mouthed the words: “Not true.” He revisits Alito’s record later, when he is wrapping up, to point out “especially striking” disagreements he had with him over interpretation of the Second Amendment. “Heller is unquestionably the most clearly incorrect decision that the Court announced during my tenure on the bench,” he says. [Alito] failed to appreciate the more limited relationship between gun ownership and liberty. Firearms, Stevens argues, “have a fundamentally ambivalent relationship to liberty.” It probably wasn’t the Citizen’s United decision itself that brought the Stevens reign to an end; he may have had a small stroke after the pressures of that January decision and then playing a game a tennis. He was replaced by Elena Kagan, with whom he has professed to be delighted. Stevens didn’t so much change as a large portion of the country who once, and still do, call themselves Republicans moved to the right. Stevens never did and he was right where we needed him for thirty-four years. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jun 16, 2019
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Jul 02, 2019
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Jun 16, 2019
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Hardcover
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1250313570
| 9781250313577
| 1250313570
| 4.28
| 61,235
| Apr 23, 2019
| Apr 23, 2019
|
really liked it
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Melinda Gates has a famous name and job, but who knows what she actually does? Running a foundation with assets exceeding that of many countries must
Melinda Gates has a famous name and job, but who knows what she actually does? Running a foundation with assets exceeding that of many countries must carry enormous stresses, particularly for people who understand that injecting cash into a problem may actually make the problem grow. What courage it must take just to try. This had to have been a hard book to write, what with a crushing schedule, children, and weighty responsibilities, to say nothing of the disparate and discrete problems of women on different continents. I am not saying there aren’t similarities among women’s experiences the world over; I’m saying that, perhaps for the purposes of this book, on each continent Gates honed in on a different critical problem among women that she might be able to affect. In Africa, she showed us women responsible for field work and cultivation. In South Asia, we look at sex workers. In America, it was education. In every country the message was about empowerment and equality. Gates sounds tentative and naïve to begin which may help her audience connect with her experience. But she has some insights sprinkled all the way along as we follow her progress from Catholic-school Texan to one of the few female programmers at a gung-ho win-at-any-cost Microsoft. Two early insights: “I soon saw that if we are going to take our place as equals with men, it won’t come from winning our rights one by one or step by step; we’ll win our rights in waves as we become empowered…If you want to lift up humanity, empower women.”Gates wonders how she could have missed these two insights early in her foundation work, and I did, too, considering this was something Hillary Clinton hammered pretty hard during her years as First Lady and Secretary of State. Both Gates and Clinton had international reach and the massive resources to understand exactly where the latch was to unleash potential and creativity. Why Gates never mentions Clinton is a mystery, unless she is trying assiduously to avoid any political fallout. That can't be right, though, as Gates is pretty fearless weighing in on religious issues. When speaking of her Catholicism and her support for birth control, that is, the notion that women must be able to control their own births, Gates says that religion and birth control should not be incompatible. She feels on strong moral ground and welcomes guidance from priests, nuns, and laypeople but “ultimately moral questions are personal questions. Majorities don’t matter on issues of conscience.” Drop mike. My hero. She gives me language to speak to critics who wish to roll back women’s right to choose. It’s not an easy decision but it is a woman’s decision. Otherwise, Christian critics, why did God give this ability to women alone? Melinda shares some empowerment struggles of her own—in a company and in a household with Bill Gates. She was intimidated, but can you blame her? With support from Bill and from colleagues and friends, she managed to develop her innate ability to cooperate and thereby manage high-performing teams, both at the company and later at the foundation. Later, Gates asks how does disrespect for women grow within a child suckling at his mother’s breast? Gates places the blame squarely on religion: “Disrespect for women grows when religions are dominated by men.” That is a brave stance, the articulation of which I am grateful. I also came to that conclusion, and it felt a lonely one. I wondered how my moral grounding felt so strong when I learned what I had in the Catholic tradition also. Perhaps our reactions are something along the lines of the questioning, probing Jesuitical tradition? “Bias against women is perhaps humanity’s oldest prejudice, and not only are religions our oldest institutions, but they change more slowly and grudgingly than all the others—which means they hold on to their biases and blind spots longer.”When she is wrapping up, Gates shares something that will help all of us in this country as we struggle through the next period, trying to avoid the dangers of political and ideological attacks (from within!) on our constitution and on our future development and ability to face the existential dangers of climate change. She gives examples of women who have brought peace to warring factions in their country and says ”Many social movements are driven by the same combination—strong activism and the ability to take pain without passing it on. Anyone who can combine those two finds a voice with a moral force.”This, I submit, could be the very key to unlocking the potential of our future. Conservatives complain relentlessly about the yapping left. Essentially, I agree. We have to stop going to the least common denominator. Women! stand up and show them how to both nurture and progress. Democrats and Republicans, we have way more in common as women than we have differences as political animals. And we have as much at stake. Those who are already empowered can make decisions on their own, so aren’t intimidated by women who may occasionally disagree. Isn't this how we learn? Those who seek empowerment can find it with other women, so join us. I definitely think there is room to work together to achieve something we haven’t yet managed here in the U.S. and need badly: coherence. Gates’ last point is one close to the hearts of every mother, teacher, groundbreaker: “Every society says its outsiders are the problem. But outsiders are not the problem; the urge to create outsiders is the problem. Overcoming that urge is our greatest challenge and our greatest promise.The Left is in agreement with the Right that every member of society must contribute something. No one wants to think they do not contribute. It is up to us to find ways for everyone to do so. And to those who insist they “got where they did by themselves,” well, go live by yourself. Praise your great wealth by looking in the mirror. Gates has written a thought-provoking and generous book, sharing much of what she has been given. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jun 24, 2019
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Jul 06, 2019
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May 06, 2019
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Hardcover
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0525562028
| 9780525562023
| 0525562028
| 4.04
| 315,908
| Jun 04, 2019
| Jun 04, 2019
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it was amazing
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This work is called a novel but it is a ball of flame tossed into a dark night, blinding, brilliant, searing. Who knows if it is poetry or novel or me
This work is called a novel but it is a ball of flame tossed into a dark night, blinding, brilliant, searing. Who knows if it is poetry or novel or memoir; the language fills the mouth and is saturated with truth. We recognize it. We’ve tasted it. We are pained by it. It still hurts. Something here is reminiscent of the epic poetry of Homer. Life's brutality, man’s frailty, the odyssey, the clash of civilizations, the incomparable language undeniably capturing human experience, these things make Vuong someone who heightens our awareness, deepens our experience, shocks us into acknowledgement of our shared experiences. What have we in common with a Greek of ancient times singing of a war and the personal trials of man? What have we in common with a gay immigrant boy writing of war and the personal trials of man? The story is clear enough but fragmentary. In a Nov 2017 LitHub interview, Vuong tells us ”I’m writing a novel composed of woven inter-genre fragments. To me, a book made entirely out of unbridged fractures feels most faithful to the physical and psychological displacement I experience as a human being. I’m interested in a novel that consciously rejects the notion that something has to be whole in order to tell a complete story. I also want to interrogate the arbitrary measurements of a “successful” literary work, particularly as it relates to canonical Western values. For example, we traditionally privilege congruency and balance in fiction, we want our themes linked, our conflicts “resolved,” and our plots “ironed out.” But when one arrives at the page through colonized, plundered, and erased histories and diasporas, to write a smooth and cohesive novel is to ultimately write a lie. In a way, I’m curious about a work that rejects its patriarchal predecessors as a way of accepting its fissured self. I think, perennially, of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictée. This resistance to dominant convention is not only the isolated concern of marginalized writers—but all writers—and perhaps especially white writers, who can gain so much by questioning how the ways we value art can replicate the very oppressive legacies we strive to end.”The novel he speaks of is this one. I did not understand that paragraph when I first read it as well as I do now. I am more aware, too, having looked closely for the Western world’s acknowledged historical tendency to erase or ignore pieces of experience not congruent with their own worldview. The language Vuong brings is exquisite and extraordinary: “The fluorescent hums steady above them, as if the scene is a dream the light is having.” “…the thing about beauty is that it’s only beautiful outside of itself.” “The carpet under his bare feet is shiny as spilled oil from years of wear.” “…repeating piles of rotted firewood, the oily mounds gone mushy…” “He had a thick face and pomaded hair, even at this hour, like Elvis on on his last day on earth.” Vuong repeats motifs to tie the experiences of one person to the rest of his life, to tie one person’s experiences to those of others: “I’m at war.” “We cracked up. We cracked open.” “…you never see yourself if you’re the sun. You don’t even know where you are in the sky.” “…my cheek bone stinging from the first blow.” “I was yellow.” A teen, immigrated to the U.S. from Vietnam with his mother, grandmother, and aunt finds himself fleeing his “shitty high school to spend [his] days in New York lost in library stacks,” from whence he, first in this family to go to college, squanders his opportunity on an English degree. The teen discovers his gayness and does not flee it, though his white lover agonizes and denies all his life. We watch that boy fall, wither, die under the scourge of fentanyl and opioid addiction and Vuong places the scourge in the wider context of an awry world. Despite (or perhaps because of) the fragmented, shattered nature of the tale, there is a real momentum to this novel, Vuong telling us things not articulated in this way before: a familiar war from a new angle, the friction burn of the immigrant experience, the roughness of gay sex, the madness of living untethered in the world. The language is so precise, so surprising, so wide-awake and fresh, that we read to see. Last year, in September of 2018, I reviewed Vuong’s first book of poetry, Night Sky with Exit Wounds. The poems had many of the same tendencies toward epic poetry—they were big, and meaningful. On my blog I have attached a short video of Vuong reading from that collection to give you some idea of his power. You're welcome, readers. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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May 05, 2019
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May 09, 2019
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May 05, 2019
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Hardcover
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1631494368
| 9781631494369
| 1631494368
| 4.20
| 15,529
| Feb 12, 2019
| Feb 12, 2019
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really liked it
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Since beginning Buttigieg's book, I have travelled across the country and spoken with lots of folks outside of my usual cabal. Nearly everyone I spoke
Since beginning Buttigieg's book, I have travelled across the country and spoken with lots of folks outside of my usual cabal. Nearly everyone I spoke with had heard of Buttigieg, current Mayor of South Bend, Indiana, running for President as a Democratic candidate. Only one of the people I spoke with mentioned his homosexuality as a reason for his possible failure to connect, and the same person was also skeptical about his age. Buttigieg himself would remind voters that his age has been the thing that conversely has energized people, particularly older voters, who recognize that their generation left his generation with a big problem when it comes to climate change. Older people who have no stake in what will come are unlikely to move the needle as far and as fast as it needs to move. Time to step aside and hope for fresh ideas. At least that is what Buttigieg is peddling. When I listen to him talk, I agree. I just want all the old men and women who have left both parties in a shambles with attempts to hold onto power (What power do they exhibit, may I ask? It’s positively derisive.) to leave the stage asap. This book is easy enough to read, though not ranking with Barack Obama’s Dreams from My Father which broke the mold on literary presidential memoirs. Truthfully, I picked up the book in the midst of an infatuation with Buttigieg’s calm sense and blunt assessments, and before I finished, I felt the bloom had left the rose. I still admire him and definitely consider him a frontrunner but I am not infatuated anymore. This is a good thing. I am clear-eyed in my support of his candidacy. Buttigieg is genuinely talented in languages, and it makes one wish we learned what he did from his linguist mother. One of my favorite of his stories is when he told Navy recruiters that he’d studied Arabic in hopes of landing an intelligence job at a desk somewhere and they wrote down that he’d studied “aerobics.” That is just classic. Buttigieg describes the feeling at rallies for presidential candidates Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump. The two rallies had the ambiance of a party, but while Bernie’s parties seem joyous and goofy—Bernie with the finch, Bernie riding a unicorn, buttons featuring glasses and hair—Donald Trump’s parties have a edge, like a party where “you’re not sure if a fight will break out.” This is good storytelling. We know exactly what he is saying and can feel the roil. What kills me about Buttigieg is that he is so quiet about some of his biggest accomplishments, e.g., he applied for a Rhodes scholarship and got it, he decided to run for president and he is a frontrunner. He doesn't thrash about explaining his calculations: a nobody mayor of a small city calmly and quietly declares an exploratory committee and begins criss-crossing the country before anyone else has even thought to get into the race and captures a lot of press because of his youth and his self-possession. He could see the Democratic party had lost its way, punctuated by the loss in 2016, to say nothing of the turmoil in what used to be a Republican party. He could see that sitting back and watching ‘the clash of the white hairs’ was not going to advance us because these folks appear bewildered by where we have landed. He thought he could be useful, pointing out the obvious and taking steps to address some of our most urgent issues. Gosh darn it if he isn’t. One of the more startling and interesting things Buttigieg said about government is that “some of the most important policy dynamics of our time have to do with the relationships, and the tension, between state and local government.”I pulled that quote out for you to see because I think this is something national pundits and talking heads miss completely. Way back in the 1970’s and 80’s Lee Atwater, a Republican strategist, figured this out and moved to capturing the heartland. That strategy has brought us gerrymandering and court-packing and other state-level indications of one-party dominance. But local governments are finding that counties walking in lock-step to the state does not always work for their particular conditions. There is great inequality as a result of GOP leadership at the state level. What is government about anyway? A Koch Brothers-funded think tank called the American Legislative Exchange Council is pointed to as generating model legislation for adoption in state legislatures and finds sympathetic state actors to carry the bills. “Legislation is often nearly identical from state to state—so much so that journalists sometimes find copy-paste errors where the wrong state is mentioned in the text of a bill. Tellingly, by 2014, ALEC had decided to expand its model beyond the state level—not by going federal, but instead targeting local policy through a new offshoot called the American City County Exchange.”Democrats must be willing to compete in red zones—many times it is only because they are not competing that they have less support. Buttigieg makes the point that many folks got involved in local and county government as a matter of course in their lives, as one aspect of community participation, and they chose the most organized party to help them on their way. That would be the Republican party. They are pretty inculcated with the party line after a few years, but they may not agree with everything the party posts. That is why Indianans could vote for both Mike Pence and Pete Buttigieg. Voters really can read, think, make up their own minds. We have to be in it to win it. I am more and more reluctant to declare myself Democrat after seeing some of the shenanigans local, state, and national leaders get up to. But I’ll be damned if I’ll sit by and watch the plotters and weavers poison the well. If ever there was a time to stand up and participate with your voices, now is that time. Pick your area of engagement, decide your level of involvement, look where you might possibly have some influence, and get engaged. No more cheering from the sidelines. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Apr 20, 2019
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May 05, 2019
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Apr 20, 2019
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Hardcover
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1250214807
| 9781250214805
| 1250214807
| 4.25
| 6,701
| Apr 24, 2018
| Mar 26, 2019
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it was amazing
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Stacey Abrams learned not always to kick right at her goal. Watching her stand back and assess a situation can be a fearsome thing. You know she is go
Stacey Abrams learned not always to kick right at her goal. Watching her stand back and assess a situation can be a fearsome thing. You know she is going to do something oh-so-effective and she is going to use her team to get there, those who mentored her and those she mentored herself. I just love that teamwork. This memoir is unlike any other presidential-hopeful memoir out there. Abrams has not declared herself for the 2020 race, but running for president is on her to-do list. I read the library edition of her book quickly and wondered why she’d write it this way; she’s a writer and this is written in a workbook self-help style. But something she’d said about ambition was so clarifying and electrifying that I ended up buying the book to study what she was doing. “Ambition should be an animation of soul…a disquiet that requires you to take action…Ambition means being proactive…If you can walk away [from your ambition] for days, weeks, or years at a time, it is not an ambition—it’s a wish.”Ambition is not something you can be passive about. You feel you must act on it or you will regret it all your days. Ambition should not a job title but something that helps you to answer “why”. Now I know why Abrams wrote her book like this. After all, she’s a writer; she could write whatever kind of book she wanted. Her ambition is to have readers feel strong and capable enough to do whatever they put their minds to, whether it is to aid someone in office or be that person in office. She learned a lot on her path to this place and she doesn’t necessarily want to get to the top of the mountain without her cohort. Her ambition is not an office, it is a result. What Abrams relates about her failures is most instructive. After all, none of us achieve all we set our minds to, at least on the first try. But Abrams shows that one has to be relentlessly honest with oneself about one’s advantages and deficiencies, even asking others in case one’s own interpretations are skewed by fear or previous failure. By writing her book this way, Abrams is unapologetic about some areas she could have handled better, personal finances for instance, that could have been used as a weapon against her. She explains her situation at the time and recommends better pathways for those who follow. A former member of the Georgia State Legislature, Abrams found herself a different breed of politician than most who had achieved that rank. She was less attuned to social sway than she was to marshaling her intellect to overcome roadblocks to effective legislation. This undoubtedly had some genesis in the reactions she’d gotten her entire life as a black woman. She wasn’t going to wait for folks to accept her; she planned to take her earned seat at the table but she was going to be prepared. She found that she needed both skills to succeed in business and in politics. She needed the support of a base and she needed an understanding of what would move the ball forward. And she learned what real power means. “Access to real power also acknowledges that sometimes we need to collaborate rather than compete. We have to work with our least favorite colleague or with folks whose ideologies differ greatly from our own…But working together for a common end, if not for the same reason, means that more can be accomplished.”Abrams discusses strategies and tactics for acquiring and wielding power and reminds us that “sometimes winning takes longer than we hope” and leaders facing long odds on worthy goals best be prepared for the “slow-burn” where victory doesn’t arrive quickly. But every small victory or single act of defiance can inspire someone else to take action. If defeat is inevitable, reevaluate. Abrams suggests that one may need to change the rules of engagement so that instead of a ‘win’ one may be happy to ‘stay alive’ to fight another day. The last fifty pages of the book put words to things we may know but haven’t articulated before. Abrams acknowledges that beliefs are anchors which help to direct us in decision-making but should never be used to block critical thinking, reasonable compromise, and thoughtful engagement. “Collaboration and compromise are necessary tools in gaining and holding power.”The GOP also believes this, but I think they use the notion within their coalition: they use discipline to keep their team in order and members may need to compromise their values to stay in the power group. Democrats must hold onto the notion of compromise within and without their coalition to succeed, while never compromising values. It is difficult to believe there is anyone out there who doesn’t admire Stacey Abrams’ guts and perseverance. Her friends stood by her in times of stress because Abrams made efforts to acknowledge her weaknesses while not allowing them to break down her spirit. She built every pillar of the leadership role she talks about and can stand before us, challenging us to do the same. She is a powerhouse. ...more |
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0316450502
| 9780316450508
| 0316450502
| 4.29
| 1,326
| Nov 08, 2018
| Nov 13, 2018
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liked it
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This book caught my eye across a crowded library. What must it have been like to experience the phenomenon that is Malala Yousafzai and what were the
This book caught my eye across a crowded library. What must it have been like to experience the phenomenon that is Malala Yousafzai and what were the earliest manifestations of her exceptionality? Ziauddin Yousafzai was unusual himself. He and his brothers all had severe stammers growing up, but not his sisters. Of course the boys bore the brunt of family expectations. He took on a challenge to become an outstanding public speaker, delivering a speech his father helped him to craft. When he won first place in the competition, he continued his effort to overcome his speech impediment through public speaking. Ziauddin was a feminist before the word was popular in Pakistan and when he married and moved with his wife, Toor Pekai, to Swat, his wife took advantage of his encouragement to embrace small freedoms during their life there. Their first daughter would be a much more enthusiastic reformer, willing to cover her head but not her face. Malala often sat with her father’s friends and answered questions of opinion he would put to her. She became a skilled public speaker through his influence, and she won many public speaking awards on her favorite topic: the rights and education of girls. Malala was exceptionally bright and curious from an early age and attracted the attention of visitors to the Yousafzai household. She also broke down the resistance to change by her conservative grandfather. She attended a school run by her father and excelled, far more than her brothers who were ordinary in schoolwork. The Yousafzai school encourage all local girls to attend, and had a large number. The campaign in which Yousafzai and his daughter Malala engaged to save girls education had been going against the Taliban’s edicts for about five years when the attack on her occurred. She was fifteen. There is detail about Malala being flown by helicopter from one hospital to another, to gradually larger ones with more surgical expertise, until she finally is set down in Birmingham, England, where they take off any blood pressuring her brain, happily discovering there was no impingement on her cognitive function. She began a long series of reconstructive surgeries to lessen the impact of the nerve damage to her face. Living in England turned the family dynamic 180 degrees. Malala had been a strong presence and leader in the family. While she was incapacitated, her younger brothers took on critical roles interfacing with British culture. The parents admit they resisted the power inversion at first, feeling out of their element, but gradually they were grateful for the boys' facility in the new environment and relied on them. The family grew closer in crisis because everyone came to recognize and accept their strengths and weaknesses. Malala’s recovery was undoubtedly due to support from her family, but also grew from her own inner strength. The damage inflicted on her gave her more opportunity to develop an extraordinary resilience, and the long recovery gave her the opportunity to concentrate on her studies. Whenever anybody has asked me how Malala became who she is, I have often used the response "Ask me not what I did but what I did not do. I did not clip her wings."The Yousafzai family members each have a quality of gratefulness that is so attractive, allowing each one to occasionally take a supporting role to another's exceptionalism. That less-lauded role is equally difficult to perform. The entire family deserves credit for surviving with such strength of character, but that specialness may stem from the leadership of Ziauddin Yousafzai, which is why this book is about him. ...more |
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Mar 24, 2019
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Mar 24, 2019
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Mar 24, 2019
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0316252166
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| 3.92
| 683
| Oct 16, 2018
| Oct 16, 2018
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Memoirs are de rigueur for anyone aspiring to the presidency. And so they should be, to introduce themselves and to give us an idea from where their s
Memoirs are de rigueur for anyone aspiring to the presidency. And so they should be, to introduce themselves and to give us an idea from where their sense of duty emanates. Nonetheless, it is disconcerting to read the memoir of someone running for president in their forties who never mentions travel abroad. At least half this book is composed of Julián’s life before he was twenty. For those who argue that “youthful indiscretions don’t matter,” here is someone who clearly thinks one’s sense of self and others grows up with you. While I might go along with that notion of human development, it is the time after age twenty when we have to make decisions that really show who we are. After graduating from Stanford University and Harvard Law, Castro returned to his home city of San Antonio, took a job with a law firm and promptly ran for San Antonio City Council in his home district and won. Right out of the gate was a big conflict of interest. Castro’s law firm represented a developer who wanted to build a golf course over the city’s aquifer and get a tax break to do it. Castro quit his paying job with the law firm, ended up voting no on the proposal with the backing of 56% of San Antonio residents. The initial project failed--not because of his vote--but another came right behind it, this time for two golf courses, but with stronger environmental protections and no tax breaks. Castro voted for the project the second time. He uses the example of this project to show the importance of local government work, but also what people can do when they have principled objections and work together. The experience fueled Castro’s interest in higher office. He lost at his first attempt to run for mayor of San Antonio, and it looks like it was his first big public failure. He felt humiliated. But like everyone who eventually succeeds, he had to pick himself up and do it again, which he did, winning in 2009. After that, he went back and forth to Washington, as head of HUD under Obama, and then mentioned as vice-presidential pick during the run up to the 2016 election. It takes a special personality to want the blood sport that is politics. Castro learned the power of the people from his mother, who was known for her organizing work. He has a twin brother who absorbed the same lessons and worked alongside him to set up and win elections while they were in college and after. But what makes one reach for the highest office? We all have to find the answer to that one, and while I am not impressed with those who want to see their names in lights—or gold letters eight feet high—there are people who are at least as capable as the rest of us but who want the limelight. I’m willing to give it to them if it makes sense for the direction we need to move. Julián Castro is not ready, to my mind, to run for the presidency. I do not get the reassurance he even knows what it is. I don't mind some learning on the job, but look at what Teresa May just went through. There is a largeness to the job that will always exceed our best attempts to put our arms around it. Do I think he would be worthy some day? Maybe. What we are doing now in our presidential slates--going as old as we can and as young as we can--is unappealing to me. Precociousness is a real thing, and I don't want to stand in the way of talent. To me, Castro for President is premature, but I have to admit the world belongs to the young now, who are going to have to find a way to live in it. ...more |
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Mar 21, 2019
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Mar 22, 2019
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1250184428
| 9781250184429
| 1250184428
| 4.14
| 572
| Mar 12, 2019
| Mar 12, 2019
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really liked it
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This book is written in spirit of an old-time newspaper man regaling cackling, amused, red-nosed patrons in a smoke-filled, dimly-lit bar with persona
This book is written in spirit of an old-time newspaper man regaling cackling, amused, red-nosed patrons in a smoke-filled, dimly-lit bar with personal and singular stories of powerful forces arrayed against a humble man who plays it as though his power is negligible. David E. McCraw may be a down-home guy…as Trump says, he has a soothing, bedroom manner…but his reach is hardly negligible. Don’t be fooled. Reading this book is every bit as fun as finding oneself under the influence…of a world-class raconteur. We get the inside story on the early days of Trump, when in 2005 Tim O’Brien, then an editor at The New York Times, published TrumpNation and got sued for it. That book is funny and as good a read as this, so get both. In hiring practice, The New York Times must adhere to the No-Asshole Rule (it’s a real thing—look it up). McCraw goes through the thought and research processes of releasing the couple pages of Trump’s tax returns from 1995, and finding the NYT and Fox News agreeing for what seemed to be the first time in history. He discusses the bizarre beginning to the Trump presidency during which Spicer sought to limit the access of newspapers, certain reporters, and insisted on telling lies about the size of crowds at the inauguration. When Trump declared the NYT to be “failing,” the senior management couldn’t resist bragging that Trump was doing more for their bottom line than a war. And McCraw doesn’t make any bones about the fact that he stood for press freedom no matter which party The Times was talking to. Hillary Clinton “had a hostility to openness that doesn’t befit a public officeholder…” Truer words were never spoken. What I admired most about the tone in this book is the big-brain reasonableness of the whole thing. I mean, here we have one of the premier newspapers in the world, with all kinds of talented reporters doing important work, but McCraw recognizes each as individuals and sees the need to tamp down their rage, at times, with the lies and shenanigans happening in the White House and the reporters impotence, in the end, to do anything but report on it. McCraw tells the story of Stanley Dearman, a newspaper editor in Philadelphia, Mississippi when three civil rights workers went missing in 1964. For 40 years after, Dearborn kept reminding citizens in print of the unsolved case of the mens’ disappearance, ignoring those who told him to “drop it.” McCraw tells us Dearborn’s work was an example of showing the difference between serving the people and catering to them. When a reporter wrote a story trying to explain the phenomenon of an ordinary-seeming midwest young man expressing adherence to the philosophies of Hitler, the outrage visited upon the paper led to threats against the reporter’s person and livelihood. “Dealing with threats against journalists had become a sadly routine part of my work life, but each time a new one surfaced a feeling of discouragement about what the country had become would come over me again.”I hear that. But perhaps the country has always been this way, that even NYT readers are quick to show their [lack of] understanding about enormously important subjects that reach to our makeup as humans. McCraw also discusses the case of David Sanger writing a book about cyber warfare based on, it was argued in court, leaks of classified documents from high-level government insiders. This is intensely interesting stuff for those who ever wondered how reporters manage to report on closely-held high-level secrets. Probably most of us would agree with McCraw that “the real problem for America was not the unauthorized revelation but an excess of secrecy.” Later he argues "Secrecy breeds absurdity." The whole book is a feast of huge stories reaching right into the psyche of America’s collective past, nearly twenty years now of stomach-churning days for someone in McCraw’s position. High stakes, for everyone. I will end before McCraw’s account of the Weinstein story, finishing with the decision to publish the 2010 Wikileaks cache and Greenwald & Poitras’ decision to bypass the NYT to have Snowden’s secrets published by The Washington Post and The Guardian instead. McCraw sounds disappointed that The Times was bypassed on the Snowden story, and I remember well the criticism of them at the time. “Maybe we should be better at inculcating all citizens—now all potential publishers—with a sense of social responsibility…I continued to believe the risks that came with freedom were worth the price…I also believe The Times had been right, in its North Korea reporting and other sensitive national security stories, to give the government a chance to responds before publication. Many readers saw that process as a surrender…McCraw ’s book raises some thorny ethical questions and answers one newspaper’s take on many more. ...more |
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Mar 04, 2019
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Mar 11, 2019
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Mar 04, 2019
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3.98
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| Jan 08, 2019
| Jan 08, 2019
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really liked it
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It is difficult to critique political memoirs without seeming to be critical the high-minded ideals these writers espouse. Kamala Harris appears outsi
It is difficult to critique political memoirs without seeming to be critical the high-minded ideals these writers espouse. Kamala Harris appears outside the norm for the kind of Washington politician we’ve put up with these past twenty years. Formerly Attorney General of California, she had to find solutions to big thorny problems that plagued governance of that state. If she didn’t “solve” the problems for all time, she always came down fighting for the side of individuals against corporate entities, big business, or thoughtless, inadequate government. Early on in this memoir Senator Harris speaks with some awe of the work of Maura Healy, current Attorney General of Massachusetts, who has been firm in defending statewide consumer protections in that state unlike any other. She mentions the work now-Senator and presidential-hopeful Elizabeth Warren has done to protect consumers from predatory lending practices and investment scams of big banks, or the greed of big pharma. Harris’ own work is strictly in this vein. Criminal justice reform, racial justice, environmental protections, wage equality, regulation of banks and corporation, fair practices for consumers. For a woman who has never served in the military, no one could ever argue this woman doesn’t know what war looks like. She has investigated the heart of drug smuggling from Mexico, immigration, sex trafficking, and other rough criminal ventures that make our hair curl. She knows what government power means and when and how to use it. She’s tough. And disciplined. And principled. After seeing how the country suffers when the presidency is filled by someone inadequate to the demands of the job, we should ever be grateful that someone of Harris’ gifts stands up to take on the brutality we’ve witnessed in Washington. Harris is the winged goddess Nemesis wielding a sword; she is implacable justice, avenger of crime. It will be bloody but it will be over when she’s done. Until Donald Trump (and more and more I am convinced that election was not a fair demonstration of the national will), we’ve never elected someone with as little support from the major parties. Democrats now have very little patience left for what is the husk of a Republican Party, and Republicans appear to detest what Democrats stand for. Harris will not be a cross-over candidate. She will be vengeance. This book is an introduction to Harris and is very good for that. Kamala was born in Oakland in the sixties of a Jamaican-economist father, and a Tamil Indian-endocrinologist mother who’d met at Berkeley during the civil rights movement. She and a sister, Maya, who is two years younger, were brought up by her single-parent mother after the breakup of her parents while she was still a child. She married Douglas Emhoff, a lawyer, in 2014. Emhoff had two children during a previous marriage. Harris begins her book talking about her youth and the importance of recognizing that our nation has been enriched by immigration. She is proud of her black heritage and chose Howard University for her undergraduate degree and graduated University of CA Hastings College of Law in 1989. She admits to terrible embarrassment at failing the CA bar the first time, but her employers supported her next, successful attempt. Harris began as Deputy District Attorney in San Francisco, then won the race for District Attorney in San Francisco in 2003. By 2004 she’d begun a program called Back on Track, to help youthful nonviolent offenders to get back into the community through work. The program was considered a success though it had a low graduation rate and was instituted in several other counties and eventually became state law. When Harris won the election for CA State Attorney General in 2010, the race tally was so close the election results were not announced for three weeks. One of her first successes was against banks liable after the sub-prime mortgage crisis, winning $26 billion from the banks, including $12 million for homeowners. As AG, Harris initiated investigations into sex and drug trafficking, hate crimes, environmental degradation, predatory lending, school truancy and foster care, as well as prison conditions and sentencing reform. Barbara Boxer announced she was going to retire as Senator to CA in 2016, and Harris was one of the first to announce her candidacy for Boxer’s seat. Harris is generally well-regarded at home in CA and among those who search for and vet candidates for high national office like Supreme Court and Attorney General of the U.S. There has been some grumbling that Harris defends misconduct by law enforcement, but overall these complaints have not hurt her popularity in the state. Harris won the congressional election against Loretta Sanchez with 62% of the vote, winning in all but four counties. Since being in Washington, Senator Harris has been a hard-hitting and outspoken critic of Trump’s policies and the Democratic Party now considers her a front-runner for president. We learn that her name Kamala (COMMA-la) means lotus, a flower that blooms above the water while its roots are planted in mud. That’s quite a visual for a successful presidency. I listened to the audio of this read by the author and produced by Penguin Audio. It is a successful sprint through the high points of a career not yet over. We get a sense of her personality, her drive, her family and friends. She is quite an opponent. ...more |
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4.45
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| Nov 13, 2018
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it was amazing
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Who would have guessed there would be two such popular and talented writers in one family as there are in the Obamas? I guess we will have to wait to
Who would have guessed there would be two such popular and talented writers in one family as there are in the Obamas? I guess we will have to wait to see if their kids, Malia and Sasha, have inherited the gene. Michelle’s book is ravishingly interesting and so smoothly written I was happy sitting there and reading it at the neglect of less pleasurable duties. The fairy-tale aspect of growing up “with a disabled dad in a too-small house with not much money in a starting-to-fail neighborhood” and ascending to the most admired and coveted house in the land is not emphasized until the last pages. Michelle looks back at Barack’s eight years in office, and how he was followed by a con man with a filthy mouth. The contrast between the two men is not subtle, and neither is Michelle’s distress. Before the disappointing turnover at the end of Barack’s time in office, the story is filled with hope—hope that Americans will see change for the better in their opportunities, schooling, wages, and leadership. Michelle’s emphasis mostly stays squarely on her own hopes rather than those of her husband, and focuses on her plans to institute mentoring for teens of color, and the building of a system for providing good food for kids in schools. Michelle made no bones about the fact that she was more a homebody than her cerebral husband who, in one anecdote, laid in bed late one night gazing at the ceiling. When asked what he was thinking about, he sheepishly answered, “income inequality.” Michelle had come from a family that was large and loud and lived close by one another in Chicago. After claiming an undergraduate degree at Princeton, Michelle moved on to Harvard Law, taking advantage of the momentum. the opportunity, and the expectation that she would achieve what her parents did not. She may not have been timid, but she wasn’t exactly expansive in her view of herself or her life. She acknowledges Barack introduced her to a larger world with different but equally important personal and societal goals and expectations that are shared by millions. I have seen in comments about this book that Michelle dodged important questions about Barack’s time in office that involved decisions the two of them would have made together, e.g., Reverend Wright, etc. and while her opinion may have added something to the narrative, I tend to agree with “write your own darn story” pushback. Michelle’s considered take on what it meant to her and her family when some people seemed to lay in wait to broadcast misinterpretations of her campaign stump speeches makes it clear we are lucky to get anything more. It is easy for us to forget Michelle was an actual surrogate for Barack. She had a heavy speechmaking schedule and drew such crowds that she finally scored a plane and a team of her own. Probably the thing I am most impressed with—and what Michelle herself is most proud of—is her raising two consequential young girls in the fishbowl that is the White House. The girls survived, even thrived, in that place, and hopefully will have absorbed some of the grace and resilience of their parents. What we don’t know is what Michelle’s next act will be, for she is still a relatively young and IVy- trained lawyer. We know she doesn’t like politics, never has, but would still like to make a contribution. Just having withstood the pressures of the White House without cracking and having takien the time to write a book that encourages others to see themselves as aspirants to national office is something to be thankful for. I am also grateful she provided the home life and support Barack needed in such a difficult job with such a difficult Congress. It wasn’t easy for either of them and in many ways it did not turn out as they had envisioned. The Obamas could have had a more placid life without trying to handle affairs of state, so their attempt to share their strong family values was a kind of blessing. The book is a wonderfully smooth read (or audio!), and is hard-to-put-down. The audio is read by Michelle herself and therefore has the emphases she wanted. Published by Crown and Random House Audio in North America, this book sold more copies in the U.S. than any other book in 2018 and will be published in 24 languages. A section of color photographs is reason enough to choose the book over the audio, but the audio is interesting because Michelle herself reads it. She has chosen to discuss things we are intrinsically interested in, like choosing a college, a major, a job, and a husband, and while many of us have had similar decisions to make we would not have had Michelle’s set of choices. The book is absolutely worthwhile. ...more |
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Feb 25, 2019
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Feb 28, 2019
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Jan 10, 2019
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Hardcover
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1590519086
| 9781590519080
| 1590519086
| 4.30
| 544
| May 18, 2017
| Feb 19, 2019
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it was amazing
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It is difficult to know where to start when talking about the northern migration of Africans, South Asians, and Middle Easterners to Europe. By now ma
It is difficult to know where to start when talking about the northern migration of Africans, South Asians, and Middle Easterners to Europe. By now many of us have formed opinions based on the nature and number of migrants to Europe in the past several years. Davide Enia reawakens our sense of wonder at the existential nature, the true terror and dangerousness inherent in the refugee journey by sea. And in the process, he reawakens our compassion. The book is a multi-year set of interviews with survivors of the mass landings of migrants on Lampedusa, an island of about eight square miles nearly midway between Italy and the coast of Africa. Approximately seventy miles from Tunisia, Lampedusa is closer than Sicily (127 miles from the African coast) and Malta (109 miles distant). In the days following the Arab Spring, flotillas of migrants arrived daily, thousands of people, thousands more than there were islanders on Lampedusa. It was overwhelming. “Fear and curiosity coexisted with mistrust and pity. The shutters remained fastened tight, or else they’d open to hand out sweaters and shoes, electric adapters to charge cell phones, glasses of water, a chair to sit on, and a seat at the table to break bread together. These were flesh-and-blood people, not statistics you read about in the newspapers or numbers shouted out over the television.”This book is written by a man trying to work out his own complicated view of the migrants, from the point of view of the shell-shocked rescuers. This attempt to understand what is at stake is braided together with Enia’s relationship with his Sicilian father and dying uncle. Gradually he unveils the thoughts of those who have spent years witnessing the movement of migrants some of whom are picked up moments before their already-swamped craft sinks irretrievably. The migrants are all ages and agonizingly aspirational. In photographs of the debris found in the refugee boats were items thought indispensable: skin creams, jars of preserved vegetables and fruit, insect repellent, chapstick, toothpaste, a can of Coca-Cola, cooking pots, lids, padlocks, keys, beach wraps, wallets, rings…the list of items took my breath away, coming as it does after learning of an invisible shipwreck in 2009. Refugees from one boat rescued in open seas remained standing on the dock on Lampedusa, staring at the horizon. A sister boat which had set sail with them the same day, holding four hundred people, never arrived. Sometimes migrants return to Lampedusa, which they call their birthplace, their second birthday the day they arrived, alive, from the sea. One young man gives some idea of the difficulty of the crossing. Their rubber dinghy ran out of gas “almost immediately.” When the salt water drenched them again and again, their skin burned and their heads felt as though they would explode. The sun shone cruelly. They floated for eighteen days, out of all provisions, reduced to drinking urine. A Maltese patrol boat appeared and tossed them gas, water, food, then sped off. The patrol watched from a distance as the dinghy moved into Italian waters. It was three more days until an Italian Coat Guard vessel picked them up. Of the eighty who had left Libya, seventy-five of them had died. Enia doesn’t begin with the tragedy in October 2013 that brought Lampedusa so vividly to everyone's attention around the world, the day a boat sank within sight of the shore, the day the seas filled with bodies. But he works up to that moment, sharing with us the experiences of those who have witnessed years of landings so that the full scope and horror of the event can be understood, looked at, and borne. The other day I saw a video clip of a landowner on the U.S. border with Mexico saying he’s a big Trump supporter, strong on national defense, and the biggest conservative around. “But,” and I’m paraphrasing him now, “I think they’re wrong on this border wall. These folks aren’t criminals or terrorists.” It sounds like this man has seen a few things. At some point we all need to imagine how we will act when faced with naked need and hardship beyond comprehension. On Lampedusa, a warehouse was refurbished with a shower to give those who escaped under the fence of the overcrowded refugee holding facility a chance to get cleaned up. “Little by little, even some of those who regularly inveighed against these immigrant kids started leaving bags in front of the warehouse with donations of shampoo, soap, shoes, and trousers. They’re seeing people on the street who were malnourished, barefoot, raggedy, and so they did their best to help them with their primary needs.”This is a necessary book, beautifully and thoughtfully written, so that all our conscious and unconscious prejudices can bubble up…and float free. And we can be the people we hope to meet, were we in need. ...more |
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Dec 21, 2018
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Jan 25, 2019
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Dec 21, 2018
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Paperback
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163557191X
| 9781635571912
| 163557191X
| 4.18
| 17,330
| Apr 05, 2018
| Jul 10, 2018
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it was amazing
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Deborah Levy is a woman for our times. She is up to her neck in this moment, stewing like a teabag. One can imagine calming a stressed constituent by
Deborah Levy is a woman for our times. She is up to her neck in this moment, stewing like a teabag. One can imagine calming a stressed constituent by sitting her down and handing her a “Femininity, as a cultural personality, was no longer expressive for me. It was obvious that femininity, as written by men and performed by women, was the exhausted phantom that still haunted the early twenty-first century.”Levy is an adult. If she hasn’t seen it all, she seen plenty enough to make judgments. While she doesn’t “have it all together,” she is confident enough to know that is not always the most salient fact in a well-lived life. I particularly appreciated the description of riding her e-bike to an appointment with the movie people on a rainy day. She wasn’t aware she had several wet leaves caught in her hair from pushing under the apple tree by her writing shed. The movie people wanted to make a film of one of her books. She tried to convince them she had a technique to present the past alongside the present without the use of flashbacks. She'd in fact learned it from watching favorite filmmakers. Within this short memoir Levy treats us to several examples of her no-flashback technique. Each is ingenious, and would be an excellent challenge for students of writing. She is inventive enough to have thought of several ways. The notion of mother is a meditation topic in this memoir. Levy is a mother, divorced now, with two teenaged girls. Her own mother dies during Levy's period of mourning for her old life, pre-divorce. Thus, she is doubly bereaved. “We do not want mothers who gaze beyond us, longing to be elsewhere. We need her to be of this world, lively, capable, entirely present to our needs.”She recognizes motherhood is some kind of impossible condition, open to fulfilling the needs of others while reneging on what one owes oneself. “When our father does the things he needs to do in the world, we understand it is his due. If our mother does the things she needs to do in the world, we feel she has abandoned us. It is a miracle she survives our mixed messages, written in society’s most poisoned ink. It is enough to drive her mad.”Just so. Born in South Africa, Levy travelled to England as a young girl. Once Levy’s mother made a return visit to SA without her; her postcard back to Levy in England sounded to my ear more like sister than mother. The years fell away. She'd visited friends who supported her during the years of political turmoil during the transition form apartheid to democracy, of which she had been an active participant. Moments like these accordion lives—is this not an example of flashback without flashback? We read on, only to discover more and more instances of the collapse of time. Levy has indeed given us several ways to view history rather than through a distancing lens. Perhaps my favorite moment of many which worked beautifully was a description of finding something in a store that would suit her mother--but shortly after her mother’s death. She temporarily forgot the death part and brought the item to the counter to purchase. When her mind suddenly kicked into the present from the past, she cried out Oh No No No No and ran from the store. “At that moment, I came too close to understanding the way Hamlet speaks Shakespeare’s most sorrowful words. I mean, not just the actual words, but how he might sound when he says them.”These moments come rarely in a lifetime. When they do, we must mark the insight. I loved this slim volume so full of someone else. Levy is just interesting. Postscipt: Levy mentions Nadine Gordimer in one description of her mother and I am reminded I’d never understood, or perhaps never had the patience to understand, Gordimer’s writing. She reminds me this may be a good time for me to experience her again. ...more |
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Sep 26, 2018
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Sep 29, 2018
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Sep 23, 2018
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Hardcover
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B00JD3ZL9U
| 4.42
| 91,154
| Oct 14, 2014
| Jul 02, 2015
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really liked it
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I listened to this remarkable story, read by Josie Dunn and published by HarperCollins Publishers UK, with a degree of disbelief. Certain parts of the
I listened to this remarkable story, read by Josie Dunn and published by HarperCollins Publishers UK, with a degree of disbelief. Certain parts of the story agree with what I’d learned already about the lives of North Koreans, the general trend of their escapes, and their orientation in South Korea as refugees. The author was young, seventeen, when she decided to cross the frozen Yalu in winter and go see her relatives in Shenyang, China. She’d had no idea where Shenyang was—that I actually could believe. And as a privileged (for North Korea) teen, she was accustomed to getting her way or being ignored. Certainly maps were not easily found, just as they weren’t in China, either, thirty years ago. The period in this book covers approximately 2000-2012, a period when Hyeonseo Lee spent ten years in China working then flew to South Korea to request asylum. Her own path to freedom was relatively smooth; she’d learned to be wary of revealing much about herself from childhood and was not easily deceived. Being young and attractive gave her the benefit of the doubt in China, and she wasn’t able to escape every attempt to corral her into exploitative jobs. But she lived on her wits and managed, eventually, to eventually pass as Chinese-Korean. With this identity she was able to procure a passport (and a new name). She lived in China ten years. I don’t want to spoil the adventure for those who aren’t familiar with her story, but it is a doozy. Her family in North Korea had a good songbun (status or name) which they exploited to bring goods in from outside the country. An uncle actually sold heroin. Her mother brought in all manner of household goods and occasionally even methamphetamines! Hyeonseo’s brother began doing much the same illicit and illegal trade work, bribing border guards, etc. after Hyeonseo left. Apparently her departure was officially overlooked, perhaps as the result of a bribe. The story rings true, and she’s told it so many times by now that there are all kinds of suggestive chapter endings which propel one to turn to the next chapter. Apparently Ms. Lee met with President Trump with some other defectors in the White House in January 2018 before the president’s departure to Singapore to meet Kim Jong Un. She has given many talks around the world about her experience and that of her family, including a TED talk I have linked to on my blog. The audio of her book is not read by the author, which is good because Ms. Lee’s heavily-accented English from 2013 is a little difficult to understand. I'm sure she is better now. The memoir is clearly and ably written, and I can see no credit for a translator. This is a defector story you probably haven’t heard, and since she has spoken around the world on this topic, you might want to see what everyone is so excited about. ...more |
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1
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Sep 13, 2018
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Sep 18, 2018
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Sep 11, 2018
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Kindle Edition
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0374184038
| 9780374184032
| 0374184038
| 3.65
| 1,209
| May 01, 2009
| May 26, 2009
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it was amazing
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One has to ask oneself why we read memoirs of travels. Wouldn’t it be better to just take off on our own, not knowing of other people’s troubles or jo
One has to ask oneself why we read memoirs of travels. Wouldn’t it be better to just take off on our own, not knowing of other people’s troubles or joys in case we are fearful or disappointed? But Rachel Cusk reminds us why we read other people’s tales: she is observant, and terribly funny. Tales of her trips make ours resonant with laughter, too. How did we first manage when confronted with grocery stores without anything we would consider food in them? Oh yes, training one’s palate until we recognize what is so special about food, in this case, in Italy. The simplicity of it. We meet the brusque-seeming, loud and insistent butcher, the tennis-playing hotelier who smokes incessantly, and the “four Englishwomen [on the train] their own laps full of purchases from Florence boutiques…returning to their rental villa in the hills….They seem to have outlived the world of men, of marriage and motherhood and children. They laugh hilariously at anything any one of them says. They are a third sex, these happy materialists.” One of the best afternoon’s amusements is listening to Cusk detail the paintings she comes upon in her travels; endless pictures of Madonna and any number of versions of the Child. She gives the backstory of Raphael, his adoration of the work of Michelangelo, and his death at the early age of thirty-seven. The observations she makes about the “congested alleyway toward the Piazza della Signoria, where a riot of of café terraces and horse-drawn tourist carriages and pavement hawkers selling African jewelry is underway.” How much has this scene changed in millennia of Italian history? Or has it always been just like this, where people “push and shove rudely, trying to get what they want…I have seen a fifteenth-century painting of the Piazza della Signoria, where children play and the burghers of Florence stroll and chat in its spacious spaces, while the monk Savonarola is burned at the stake in the background outside the Palazzo Vecchio. Here and there peasants carry bundles of twigs, to put on the fire.”So few are the antiquities that people from the world over wait in long, snaking lines, “an overgrown humanity trying to fit into the narrow, beautiful past, like a person in corpulent middle age trying to squeeze in to a slender garment from their youth.” It takes one’s breath away, the clarity with which Cusk writes, reminding us of what we may have once observed but could not convey. The Catholics have a large presence in Italy, the Basilica di San Francesco lending credence to “the giantism of Catholic architecture…which harmonize unexpectedly with the iconography of late capitalism…the airport terminal…and the shopping mall.” Cusk takes the stuffing out of adults who use “Christianity as a tool, a moralizing weapon they had fashioned in their own subconscious…the strange, dark chasm of repression and subjectivity…judgment lay down there…flowing like a black river.” Do I need to say Catholic school growing up in England was a less than satisfactory experience? This is the book I would give a friend to explain why I love the work of Cusk so. How can one not appreciate the quiet way she inserts her family into an unfamiliar world and does not spare herself nor anyone else the sharpness of her observations. The family moves over a period of months, down the Italian coast, just south of Naples. The last day of their southern journey, the ‘bottom’ of their vacation, they are denied a trip to Capri by boatman strike. Instead they boat to Positano where father, mother, and two children paid fifteen Euros each to lie on the beach. Beside them were young American newlyweds in white bathers, ‘groomed as gods” but timid and self-conscious. Cusk wishes she had a Raphael to paint them for her, and I do, too. Cusk has a warmth in her writing for the magnificent, the ‘theatrical and sincere,’ the elaborate, the splendid Italians, and she tells us her children will always remember Italy as a place they want to live. Her husband gets no notice, and if we did not know she travelled in a family of four, we would not know he was there at all. This book was published in 2009, and three short years later her marriage lay in ruins. We see the beginning of that split here, methinks. One feels quite as though one had done this journey, too, traveling along with sunburnt girls in the back of a car with the windows wide. The final week in a faded blue tent strike us as real as real can be—even with the call from the publisher saying the rights to publish her last book in South Korea allowed them the possibility of a glorious, comfortable night in a seaside resort with gold bathroom fixtures but an unused swimming pool and a beautifully-appointed restaurant in which no one ate. ‘Rewarding’ hardly seems adequate praise. I savor her work like Peruginas. Her writing is for me like one of those moments she describes whose effects will last forever…visually stunning, thought-provoking, delicious to remember. The summer feels lived. ...more |
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1
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Aug 21, 2018
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Aug 25, 2018
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Aug 21, 2018
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Hardcover
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1595231072
| 9781595231079
| 1595231072
| 3.99
| 332
| Nov 19, 2013
| Nov 19, 2013
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did not like it
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This book was published in 2013, written with Marc Thiessen, former speechwriter to Donald Rumsfeld and political columnist. It has about fourteen pag
This book was published in 2013, written with Marc Thiessen, former speechwriter to Donald Rumsfeld and political columnist. It has about fourteen pages of glossy photos mostly of the recall period when protesters took over the state capitol in Madison. The pictures are frightening, of angry people in a democratic system appearing to come apart. The final third of the book after the photos is a victory lap, comparing Walker to Reagan, and even once to Obama: “President Obama and I could not be philosophically further apart…But in some other respects, President Obama and I ran similar campaigns. We even had the same slogan: “Forward.” (…“Forward” is the Wisconsin state motto.)The arrogance of this comparison is almost too much to bear. One wonders who paid for this book to be written. The publisher is Sentinel, a conservative imprint of Penguin Random House established in 2003. Scott Walker was responsible for the passing of Act 10 in Wisconsin which increased the contribution from public employees to pension and health care, limited their right to collectively bargain for wages, and eliminated the requirement that beneficiaries of union bargaining pay dues. Police and firefighters were not included as public sector employees in any restriction to rights. Walker proposed the legislation immediately after taking office in 2011, with no explanation and no warning. Later, Walker would write in this book that even his wife Tonette had no idea what he was trying to accomplish. He asked himself, “If even my own wife didn’t see why we needed to change collective bargaining, how could I expect the voters of Wisconsin to see it? I was obviously doing a lousy job of explaining our reforms.” This man is dead serious. “Before we had introduced Act 10, we had methodically gone through every aspect of our plan of action with my cabinet. We had the legislative plan mapped out to the smallest detail. We had prepared for every contingency—even down to having the National Guard at the ready to take over state prisons if correction officers went on strike. But the one thing we had not done was to prepare the people of Wisconsin for the changes we were about to enact.”This stunning admission that Walker considered force before explanations is terrifying. And I don't like the use of "we" because it deflects initiative and blame. The public unions were willing to increase contributions to pensions and benefits and would have discussed loopholes in the system. Even the Democratic stronghold of Rahm Emanuel’s Illinois required adjustments to excessive and unfair overtime payments, among other collectively-bargained agreements that had gotten out of hand. It sometimes happens in the best-intentioned agreements. They need adjusting, not wholesale elimination. Walker kept repeating the mantra that jobs had increased in his state after Act 10, but to my knowledge he never asked himself whether the jobs were good jobs with wages high enough to sustain families and pay taxes. Did he replace higher-paying jobs with lower-paying jobs? “I knew I had done the right thing, but I had not taken the time to explain why it was the right thing to do….Tonette is an excellent political barometer for me because she is like a lot of Wisconsin voters…” This is a real political animal at work, with a range of opinions coming to him from the far reaches of his bedroom. Then the argument changes: “For some, it’s difficult to change. As the American Enterprise Institute’s Rick Hess points out, ‘It’s really hard for Pan Am or TWA to just turn into JetBlue’… That’s why charter schools are still important. They give innovators a chance to start the educational equivalents of JetBlue.” There is too much here to unpack & argue with—we are being hit from every direction with ink in a fan. We really need to debrief these folks and figure out what their real problem is with public schools. I think I know but would like to hear it from them. I believe they want to obscure the reasons for their support of charter schools because they know we cannot support them…it just isn’t teacher’s salaries. I think Jane Mayer gave us the explanation in her book Dark Money: indoctrination. Six weeks before his recall election in June 2012, a year and a half after he took office, Walker went to Illinois. “This election is way bigger than me,” he said, and I think that is probably true. Lots of money and support—outside money and support—was riding on his ability to show that breaking the unions and furthering the cause of charter schools made a difference in a formerly Democratic stronghold. “Without the recall, I would never have had the opportunity to campaign across the state to defend our record. I would never have had a reason to air television ads across the state explaining the success of our reforms…It just goes to show that the extremism of your opponents is often your greatest weapon in the fight for what is right.”Let’s concede that last one. And give him a fight he will never forget. ...more |
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1
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Jul 28, 2018
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Jul 29, 2018
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Jul 28, 2018
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Hardcover
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006268793X
| 9780062687937
| 006268793X
| 4.19
| 366
| Jun 05, 2018
| Jun 05, 2018
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liked it
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One day on the radio I heard Terry Gross of FreshAir interview a reverend of the evangelical school recant his less-than-spiritual political teachings
One day on the radio I heard Terry Gross of FreshAir interview a reverend of the evangelical school recant his less-than-spiritual political teachings to his parishioners. The interview did not really tell the moment this man realized violence, bending the truth, and shaming of public figures was not the best way to spread the gospel. I was curious, given present evangelical support for a clearly ethically-challenged president. If I were to say Costly Grace is just another way of Rob Schenck of achieving what seems to be his lifelong goal—fame & a degree of fortune—it sounds like sour grapes from me. From the start of his ministry Schenck felt he was underutilized. Many of us feel that way in our lives, and supplement our jobs with more meaningful work. In his case, Schenck brought that extra-curricular political work into the pulpit, declaring that defenders of abortion rights are evil. Increasingly strident calls for shutting clinics led to the murder of an abortion doctor by someone Schenck did not know but who lived in his home town of Buffalo, New York. Though Schenck professed not to advocate violence, his words as reverend were profoundly divisive. Even when he attended the funeral for the slain doctor, he pushed his message in the bouquet he sent to the widow. The pushback he received forced him back a step, but he continued his message, convinced of his righteousness. Faith and Action is a christian not-for-profit ministry he founded to lobby Congress and which he based in D.C. He says “I struggled with how oversimplifications of difficult and complex human problems and actions were a convenient shortcut for me…Decades later, that cheapening of human experience would haunt me. But not yet.”I don’t resent his admitting wrong-headedness after a long life. I just question whether spending so much time relating his own life and experiences was the best way to do it. Surely a more robust discussion of the reasons such views do not actually follow Christian teachings would be useful, rather than a personal memoir. Schenck had first been radicalized by Jerry Falwell who thought Christians had been silent too long and needed to make known their political concerns. He was encouraged by Reagan’s “city on a hill” metaphor and W’s answer to ‘the philosopher he admired most was “Christ, because he changed my heart.”’ It is interesting that the beginning of the crumbling of Schenck’s defenses came with the election of Barak Obama, and his understanding of race in America. Schenck didn’t consider himself racist, having been born to a Jew and subjected in youth to slurs, but he could see why black men and women were rejoicing, could see we lived in a society that had discounted them. He had to admit that God probably loved Obama and the liberals as much as he loved conservatives. Probably the most important part of Schenck’s re-education came about as a series of visits he made to Morocco to engage with Muslim clerics and a series of therapy sessions instigated by his wife. Schenck had considerable fame at this point, and perhaps an inflated idea of himself and what he had come to believe. He discovered that Muslims are really just humans also, and his wife helped him to see discrepancies between the man he felt he was and how he manifest in the home. If you aren’t beginning to see why this man annoys me so, you may not understand why this book was unsatisfying. Schenck had not attended college when he left high school but did a course of bible studies for four years and attended a short course in the ministry. His historical, scientific, psychological, and philosophical learning came through life lessons and his work. This way of learning has a very long ramp up time and Schenck’s life demonstrates that phenomenon. His wife, on the other hand, was interested in her own education and gradually developed more liberal views sooner than her husband. Her influence on her husband, and her views put pressure on him to understand the world in a larger way. When Schenck was offered the opportunity to study for a PhD, he admits he did it so that he could be called "Doctor" instead of just "Reverend." He decided to study Dietrich Bonhoeffer and travelled to Germany for a short course on his life and writings. Bonhoeffer’s experiences in WWII made a big impression on Schenck, himself the son a Jew. He began to see all people as God’s creation, forcing him to look at his life’s work in a new way. Called upon to intervene when Pastor Jones of Florida declared he would burn a tower of Korans, he began to see a grotesquerie of passionate evangelicals and extreme nationalism when he discovered Jones’ church escorts were armed. Further, he discovered the evangelical churches operating in America “shared a generic disease with German churches of the 1930s: they’d traded “the supreme lordship of Jesus Christ for the demigods of political and social potentates.” Yes, finally. Long road. But when he wrote his dissertation, he was afraid if it was circulated that he would become a pariah in his own religious community where he’d been teaching all these years. It was guns finally that changed the argument. How can someone pro-life be pro-gun? When Trump won the nomination and then the presidency, Schenck could clearly see how far evangelicals had strayed from their religious roots. I am grateful his conversion took place. I wish I could feel as confident that he’d given up his unhealthy attraction to fame and self-aggrandizement. Is it wrong to like the limelight? It could be. That is something he will have to ask himself in conversation with his God. He writes in the Afterword that his editor at HarperCollins was responsible for “pulling the story out of him.” He also gives credit to his collaborator on the 2015 film The Armor of Light that asks if a pro-gun stance can be reconciled with God’s word. So perhaps this memoir is not a promotional vehicle for the film, as I previously imagined. Again, I can’t judge that. But since we haven’t had many pastors reveal their ‘road to conversion,’ this will have to do. ...more |
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not set
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not set
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Jul 12, 2018
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Hardcover
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0544716248
| 9780544716247
| 0544716248
| 4.06
| 1,797
| May 08, 2018
| May 08, 2018
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it was ok
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I guess one doesn’t get to be ambassador to a nation important to our security concerns by being a shrinking violet. McFaul clearly is not that. Right
I guess one doesn’t get to be ambassador to a nation important to our security concerns by being a shrinking violet. McFaul clearly is not that. Right from the start he admits that he sometimes mixed his academic concerns with activism. He thought the moment for the Russia’s transition to democracy was at hand, and he not only wanted to witness it, he wanted to midwife. My biggest objection to this over-long memoir of McFaul’s time studying & serving as U.S. government apparatchik in Russia is that I didn’t learn anything. We hear beaucoup details of the results of McFaul’s tweets, meetings with dissidents, official meetings, but nothing stood out as new information. Except perhaps one thing. I wasn’t aware that Putin appeared not to like the foreign policy side of his work running the government. While Medvedev was President of Russia (2008-2012), McFaul had a conversation with then-Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, who turned away any questions regarding foreign policy, referring them to Medvedev, while he appeared content to concern himself with military affairs, readiness, weaponry, etc. This could have just been Putin wisely not wanting to inadvertently wander outside his wheelhouse, compromising his stated role. Later he felt confident returning to role of president, and presumably still finds the foreign policy side difficult. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is mentioned so seldom in McFaul’s memoir that this reader is curious. McFaul clearly felt he had the ear of President Obama…and didn’t waste time adding any layers to his reporting. He did speak later more effusively and extensively of John Kerry, who came after Secretary Clinton. It makes me think Kerry insisted upon being the intermediary between McFaul and Obama, as I would have done. McFaul seems capable enough, but he is seriously loud when it comes to blowing his own horn. I am suspicious of anyone so sure of what another country should be doing politically. I’m afraid I agree that, within limits, we really shouldn’t interfere in other countries’ affairs. I don’t object to studying nascent movements of liberation and democratization, but I do have a problem with influencing the course of events in an overt way (or perhaps more importantly, in a covert way). No wonder Putin doesn't like him. Of course McFaul should not be questioned by Putin & there is no moral equivalency with what McFaul did and what the Russian operatives did to influence our election. McFaul does give us examples of how the 'false news' narrative was happening in Russia a long time before it showed up in the U.S.--exactly the same kind of thing we are experiencing now with officials actually denying what they just said or did. Freaky. Who would have believed it? but it turns out to be effective. I began reading this memoir but quickly realized I could not just sit there & handle the level of detail McFaul included. I switched to audio so that I could listen while working on other things (refinishing furniture, as it happens), and it was not the voice of the reader, L.J. Ganser, that made me peevish but the words that McFaul chose and the things he decided to tell us. I'm sure he is a perfectly nice person, but I'm also sure he would roll right over me. ...more |
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Jul 18, 2018
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not set
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Jul 07, 2018
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4.39
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4.11
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3.70
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it was amazing
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4.04
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it was amazing
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4.20
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4.25
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it was amazing
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4.45
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it was amazing
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it was amazing
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4.18
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it was amazing
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4.42
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3.65
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it was amazing
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4.06
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it was ok
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Jul 07, 2018
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