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0393356213
| 9780393356212
| 0393356213
| 4.36
| 923
| Nov 06, 2018
| Nov 06, 2018
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it was amazing
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History comes to life in Russell Shorto's brilliant 2018 book "Revolution Song", a nonfiction multi-biography of six real-life figures that helped sha
History comes to life in Russell Shorto's brilliant 2018 book "Revolution Song", a nonfiction multi-biography of six real-life figures that helped shape and define the American Revolution. The book follows Cornplanter, a Seneca chief who initially sided with the British and, later, worked with the fledgling American government to help the various tribes of the Northwest; George Washington, the reluctant general and beloved war hero who would become the natural choice for first president of the United States; Lord George Germain (Sackville), a British Secretary of State whose hard-line views led to war against the colonies; Venture Smith, a slave who bought his freedom and became an embryonic force for the abolitionist movement; Margaret Moncrieffe (later, by marriage, Coghlan), a British aristocrat forced into a bad marriage who, while in debtor's prison, published one of the early feminist manifestos that inspired the Suffragette movement; Abraham Yates, Jr, a patriotic politician and virulent anti-federalist who fought against the "elites" like Alexander Hamilton to provide basic rights for the common people of the new U.S. and not just for rich white landowners. This book is phenomenal, if only for its diverse cross-section of multiple actors in the Revolution, many of whom have been, until recently, traditionally ignored by historians. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Mar 05, 2025
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Mar 17, 2025
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Mar 05, 2025
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Paperback
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0593297342
| 9780593297346
| 0593297342
| 4.09
| 10,356
| Oct 04, 2022
| Oct 04, 2022
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really liked it
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8/30/2024 addendum: Definitely one of the best biographies of Trump written in the past decade... Someday, the most definitive and comprehensive biogra 8/30/2024 addendum: Definitely one of the best biographies of Trump written in the past decade... Someday, the most definitive and comprehensive biography of Donald Trump will be written, but, until that time, Maggie Haberman’s wonderful book “Confidence Man” will suffice. To be fair, nailing down the truth about Trump is probably akin to trying to catch an electric eel with your bare hands: it’s slippery as hell and you’re prone to get shocked every once in a while. Trump has inflated and confabulated so much of his own life in numerous interviews and books throughout his life that it’s virtually impossible to get a completely accurate picture of him, but Haberman tries, sifting through the morass of bullshit to the nuggets of truth. For the most part, she succeeds in giving us a better understanding of Trump, and the result is surprisingly entertaining, if not also disturbing. Haberman, a journalist who has been covering Trump long before he threw his hat in the ring for president in 2015, is one of the few reporters Trump has repeatedly let interview him, without filing libel lawsuits. (The other one is Bob Woodward.) She has been both lauded and criticized for being “too friendly” with Trump, although she certainly doesn’t paint a flattering picture of Trump in “Confidence Man”. Neither has she written a vitriolic hit-piece. I think that Haberman is simply one of those dying breeds: a good journalist who believes in being as objective as possible, a journalist that simply lays the facts and information on the table and lets us, the readers, judge for ourselves. In fact, the portrait she paints of Trump in her book is a fair one, with plenty of straightforward color in narrow brushstrokes and some realistic shade. If he comes across as shallow, it is merely because he is shallow. There are some eye-opening stories in here. Too many to recount, and Haberman does a better job telling them anyway. But there is one that I found rather humorous and enlightening and says a lot about the kind of man Trump is. At one point during an interview, Haberman felt (as she often did) that she probably wasn’t getting too much actual valuable information from Trump, so she switched gears and asked him a silly question. Well, silly to you and me, but apparently not to Trump. She asked Trump why he ate so much fast food. (It is verifiable fact that Trump frequently ate fast food fare, McDonald’s being a favorite.) His response was that he often didn’t like restaurants because one normally has to book reservations. This meant that the chefs had plenty of time to poison his food. Fast food places don’t know that he’s coming ahead of time, so they can’t poison the food. I’m fairly certain that Trump wasn’t joking. I get the impression that Haberman didn’t think he was joking either, which is why she included it in the book. It may be a small anecdote, but it seems to say a lot about Trump’s character. ...more |
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1
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Mar 29, 2023
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Apr 08, 2023
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Mar 13, 2023
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Hardcover
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0385545681
| 9780385545686
| 0385545681
| 4.54
| 128,352
| Apr 13, 2021
| Apr 13, 2021
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it was amazing
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April 2022 is, unofficially, National Rich White Asshole Appreciation Month. (Don't Google it: I just made it up.) I've read more than a few books abo
April 2022 is, unofficially, National Rich White Asshole Appreciation Month. (Don't Google it: I just made it up.) I've read more than a few books about stupid rich white men (yes, OTHER than Trump) and the damage that they have done throughout history. I read this one back in December 2020. It's the epitome of Rich White Assholes. Once upon a time, there were three brothers who were doctors, and, like most doctors, they probably went into their profession with the best intentions, which was to help people. Early on in their careers, they were helping people, and they were being recognized as extremely innovative in their particular fields of medicine. Then, something happened. Maybe it was the money. Maybe it was the power that they gradually began to accrue. Maybe they just succumbed to basic human greed. Whatever the reason, their empire became corrupt. And even though it is an overused word, some people began to see their empire as “evil”. Their empire was hurting people—-millions of people. Even killing them. And the three brothers, along with their family, knew it, but they didn’t seem to care. Their legacy had become the very opposite of what they set out to do. Their empire had become an “Empire of Pain”. This is the title of Patrick Radden Keefe’s book about the Sackler family. If you’re like me, you probably had never heard the name “Sackler” before reading this book. There’s a very simple reason for this: the Sacklers don’t want people to know their names or what they have done. The Sackler family—-a very large family comprised of the children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren of the original three brothers: Arthur, Mortimer, and Raymond—-is, by all accounts, one of the top ten wealthiest families in the country. They have accumulated this wealth over many decades via advancements they have made within the medical field and the pharmaceutical industry. The Sackler Bros., in 1952, bought a small pharmaceutical company called Purdue-Frederick. Today, it is called Purdue Pharma, and it has made billions on the sale of its most famous and best-selling drugs, OxyContin. By the way, Arthur is credited for inventing and perfecting the pharmaceutical advertising industry, a multi-billion dollar industry wholly separate from the pharmaceutical industry, but both industries are forever beholden to one another. OxyContin, a pain-killing drug derived from an opioid called oxycodone, has been determined to be extremely addictive and even deadly if abused. OxyContin abuse has risen dramatically in the past several decades, so much so that government groups such as Health and Human Services (HHS) and the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) have dubbed it an “opioid epidemic”. Doctors are still prescribing the drug. One may wonder why, if it is as bad as many experts claim. The answer is because it is an FDA-approved, thoroughly-tested drug. The problem is that, as some investigations have revealed, there were some major improprieties between the Sacklers and the FDA (The Food and Drug Administration, which is the government agency tasked with approving or disapproving prescription drugs). It has also been revealed that some of the original findings of early drug testing were fabricated. Numbers were “fudged”. Basically, the Sacklers lied to the public and duped the entire pharmaceutical industry into thinking that OxyContin was a safe drug. It’s not. Today, nearly every state has filed numerous lawsuits against Purdue Pharma and the Sacklers personally. Some cases have come out on the side of the many victims, but just as many have come out in favor of the Sacklers. The family, it is widely believed, has extremely deep pockets and many politicians and judges are being bought by the Sacklers. The legal battles against the Sacklers are ongoing, but very little sticks to the family. They are made of teflon. Even worse, they continually demonstrate very little remorse or compassion to the millions of victims. Most family members don’t even think that they have done anything wrong and that the public disdain against Purdue Pharma and the Sacklers is misplaced. All of this, some family members say, is simply due to weak-willed junkies who are misusing and abusing a wonderful drug. Keefe’s epic-length reportage is thorough and engaging. It is one of those rare nonfiction accounts that is difficult to put down. It also makes one realize why the general public has some serious trust issues with the 1 percent. I detest rich people, and it’s books like this that cement that feeling. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Dec 22, 2021
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Dec 30, 2021
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May 11, 2021
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Hardcover
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0805069372
| 9780805069372
| 0805069372
| 3.82
| 515
| Jun 11, 2003
| Jun 11, 2003
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it was amazing
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Here’s what I knew about John Adams before reading John Patrick Diggins’s biography: ****Adams was the second president of the United States. Okay, that Here’s what I knew about John Adams before reading John Patrick Diggins’s biography: ****Adams was the second president of the United States. Okay, that’s it. Seriously, that was the extent of my knowledge of the man, other than the fact that Paul Giamatti played him in a mini-series that I haven’t seen. While Diggins’s biography is short (176 pages, all told, with about 20-plus pages of end notes and index), it is dense with information. I assume Diggins writes the same way that he lectures (he is a history professor at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York), which is in an avuncular, erudite, and verbose manner. He most likely has a huge following of history students who find him fascinating. Diggins’s subject matter may not be the most fascinating president in history, but don’t tell Diggins that. In his short book, Diggins attempts to give Adams the credit he is due for helping to create this country, and, for the most part, he succeeds. Here’s a (not so) short rundown of the pertinent information and some facts that I just found really interesting about Adams: ****He was really smart. I know that sounds like one of those “duh!” statements, because Adams was, like, one of the Founding Fathers, but he was, by many accounts, an intellectual powerhouse. Short by stature (especially stuck between behemoths George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, both 6’ 2” to Adams’s 5’7”), his contemporaries nevertheless looked up to him as a great mind. He also wrote a lot. Seriously, the guy would write and publish a book during bathroom breaks. He also carried on a lifelong epistolary relationship with Jefferson to the day they died, which was, weirdly, the same day: July 4, 1826. He is also known for his many beautiful love letters that he wrote to his wife, Abigail, which leads me to the second fascinating tidbit: ****His wife was a super-awesome feminist long before feminism was a thing. Besides being an outspoken, strong woman who was clearly an equal in mind and heart with her husband, Abigail was also a devoted, loving wife. Likewise, John was smitten and equally devoted. They considered themselves best friends as well as lovers, which is, I have found, the secret to a healthy and happy marriage, and theirs was. ****Adams was often wrongly accused of being a monarchist, but a lot of that was because Jefferson was an asshole and wasn’t above smear campaigns (he basically stole Adams’s second term) that twisted Adams’s writing to make it look like he was for big government. In truth, Adams was for a strong government, because he felt that, unchecked, society would fall into a quagmire of chaos and arbitrary divisiveness that pitted groups against groups, rich against poor, strong against weak, etc. Jefferson, who essentially created the Republican party (a slightly different party than the one we know now, but not by much), believed in stuff like state’s rights and was against federal overreach of any kind. Jefferson was almost a textbook libertarian, because he believed that the people can govern themselves. A nice idea, but Adams (rightly) thought it was bullshit: “[T]o Adams, it was the arbitrariness of society that makes the rules of government necessary. Society on its own introduces what today our contemporary postmodernists call the “spectacle of signifiers” and what Adams called the “language of signs”, where much of life is ceremony and ritual, simulated rather than real, and what is seen is more important than what can be known and what is written more important than what can be proven. Society is theater, politics performance and spin, and aristocracy is wherever the limelight lands. Society, not government, is the problem, for it is the playground of the passions, of pride and pretense, where the vein demand recognition. (p.4)” ****Adams believed in a strong executive position, which is ironic in that he was a one-term president. This belief is perhaps the reason, oft-cited by his own era’s critics, that Adams is accused of being a monarchist. If anything, it was a misunderstanding of Adam’s intent. As Diggins explains, “In the historical past a wise king would mediate between the poor and the rich, the “credulous many” and the “artful few”, knowing that the latter class would take advantage of the former. Adams looked to the modern executive office to play the same role lest the superior talents in the Senate “swallow up” the less educated members of the House. (p. 59)” ****Adams predicted America’s unholy and dangerous obsession with money, materialism, and consumerism: “A free people are the most addicted to luxury of any: that equality which they enjoy, and in which they glory, inspires them with sentiments which hurry them into luxury. A citizen perceives his fellow-citizen, whom he holds his equal [to] have a better coat or hat, a better house or horse, than himself, and sees his neighbors are struck with it, talk of it, and respect him for it; he can not bear it; he must a will be upon a level with him. Such an emulation as this takes place in every neighborhood, in every family; among artisans, husbandmen, labourers, as much as between dukes and marquisses, and more---these are all nearly equal in dress, and are now distinguished by other marks. Declamations, oratory, poetry, sermons against luxury, riches, and commerce, will never have much effect: the most rigorous sumptuary laws will have little more. “ In other words, people are greedy fucking bastards. ****Adams prevented a huge war between the U.S. and France. In what became known as “The X,Y,Z Affair”, French officials sneakily tried to bribe the United States out of millions of dollars. If we didn’t pay, they said, we would be branded as France’s #1 enemy. Adams told France to blow it out their ass, we weren’t paying a “protection fee”. Jefferson, the asshole, would have paid the money, because he had a soft spot for France, believing the French Revolution was a good and wonderful off-shoot of the American Revolution. Adams felt the French Revolution was gauche and god-awful. He berated Jefferson’s francophilism and questioned his sickening tolerance of the guillotine. This whole incident, by the way, cemented a (relatively one-sided) rivalry between Adams and Jefferson. Despite the rest of the country considering Adams a hero, Jefferson resented Adams. Did I mention Jefferson was an asshole? ****Sadly, Adams will forever be associated with the worst piece of anti-immigrant legislation ever written: The Alien and Sedition Acts. Primarily set down as a reaction to the afore-mentioned U.S.-France war-that-never-was, the acts comprised four pieces of legislation. The first was the Naturalization Act which attempted to reduce the number of immigrants by extending residency requirements for new citizens from five to fourteen years. The Alien Act authorized the presidency to kick out immigrants deemed too dangerous. The Alien Enemies Act gave the president, during war-time, the power to deport aliens of enemy countries and/or to limit their rights. The Sedition Act essentially made it illegal to criticize the government. Adams regretted signing these into law almost immediately. Thankfully, three of the four were repealed by 1802. Unfortunately, the Alien Enemies Act stayed on the books, later allowing FDR to create Japanese internment camps during WWII. In case you aren’t aware of this piece of American history, our government rounded up American citizens---mostly Japanese-Americans---and put them in concentration camps. In the U.S. It seriously pains me that I even wrote those last couple sentences. ****Adams invented taxes, which made everybody hate him. Well, asshole Jefferson didn’t hate it, because it played into his campaign to oust Adams so that he could be the next president. Never mind that taxes were needed if Americans wanted those services they so desired. And the struggle continues, as Americans still hate paying for the wonderful services that taxes provide, like police, fire, public schools, libraries, roads, bridges, electricity, military defense. Damn you, Adams! Just kidding, I actually think all that stuff is pretty necessary and good, and I don’t mind that my tax money goes toward it all. ****Adams never owned slaves, and he was a vocal abolitionist long before it was cool. ...more |
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1
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not set
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Jul 21, 2020
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Jul 20, 2020
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Hardcover
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0805069364
| 9780805069365
| 0805069364
| 3.97
| 1,161
| Jan 07, 2004
| Jan 07, 2004
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it was amazing
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I decided a while ago that I wanted to devote this year to reading a biography (or several) of every president of the United States, in chronological
I decided a while ago that I wanted to devote this year to reading a biography (or several) of every president of the United States, in chronological order, for no reason other than the fact that it sounds interesting and educational and I’ve kind of always wanted to do it. This decision was made before all hell broke loose in the world and a global pandemic decided to rear its ugly head, so I’ve been a bit preoccupied. Like many people, I think I’ve been a little anxiety-ridden and somewhat depressed about the state of the world, worried about my loved ones, worried about my own health, terrified at the prospect that I live in a country with a rotten diseased kidney stone with feet, a bad wig, and the mental capacity of a five-year-old in a coma sitting in the Oval Office, making life or death decisions for the rest of the country, decisions that any five-year-old in a coma would inherently know is stupid. I mean, Jesus Christ, Trump, will you please just shut the fuck up and listen to the grown-ups in the room speaking for once in your life?.. Anyhoo, now that every library in my state is closed, I’ve kind of been unable to get the books I want anyway, so I had to make do with what I got, which is surprisingly a lot. In my own personal library I apparently had about three or four biographies of George Washington. The first one I read, Joseph Ellis’s “His Excellency”, was an excellent and succinct little summation of the man’s life. The next one I picked up was actually one that I had out from the library for over a month, but since the library’s closed, I can’t return it anyway. Thankfully, due dates mean nothing anymore as fines have been suspended. So, take that, coronavirus! You may take our libraries, but you can’t take our freedom... to keep library books way past their due dates! Yay! Times Books published a series of reader-friendly (translation: short) bios of every president in The American Presidents series. Each book is written by both well-known and/or extremely reputable historians, some of whom you may have actually heard of. They are all writers who would never think of ending a sentence, like that last one, with a preposition. “George Washington” (do I really need to say that it’s the first book in the series?) was written by James MacGregor Burns and Susan Dunn. It’s very readable and concise, almost like a CliffsNotes version of his life. Here’s some fun facts I learned: ****Washington, was fond, of, commas. Especially, unnecessary ones. He, apparently, never learned, the grammatical, axiom, “When in doubt, leave them out.” In all seriousness, Washington was a beautiful writer but a very shy one. He didn’t write a hell of a lot, or if he did, he wrote in diaries or letters, many of which he tried to destroy before he died. Luckily, many survived. ****Washington started what is often referred to as the Seven-Year War, probably by accident: In 1754, when he was barely in his mid-20s, Washington had rose in the ranks of the British colonial army to Lieutenant Colonel. Highly inexperienced, Washington and his men, aided by Indian guides, “came upon a small French troop and carried out a surprise attack, only to discover that one of the Frenchman they killed was an envoy on a mission similar to Washington’s earlier one, to warn the British off French land. The shots Washington’s men fired marked the start of the French and Indian War. (p. 27)” ****As a young boy, Washington (who came from modest means) wanted so badly to be a part of the landed gentry that he modeled himself from a book of 17th-century French manners. He lived by these basic rules of etiquette his entire life. ****Washington inadvertently helped in creating the two-party system. Obviously, the Republicans and Democrats as they exist today weren’t around in Washington’s day, but the embryonic beginnings of both parties were birthed by Washington’s administration. Washington (with lots of education by his friend and Cabinet member Alexander Hamilton) fashioned himself a Federalist, a believer in strong, big government. He believed that the government should be there to provide for the little people. On the other side of the argument were people like James Madison and Thomas Jefferson, who fashioned themselves Republicans, who believed that the real power should be left in the hands of the people. They believed in a smaller, less-powerful federal government, with most governing powers given to the states. Ironically, Washington hated the idea of political parties, but his words, actions, and policies eventually aided in shaping the two-party system as it exists today. ****Washington was the only president to ever lead an army in the field, as a president. To be fair, it was against a bunch of scared alcoholics, nobody was killed on either side, and the whole episode was basically an embarrassment to the new United States. It was the 1794 Whiskey Rebellion, led by angry farmers pissed off at having their whiskey taxed. Only two people were convicted of treason, and Washington quickly pardoned them, primarily because they were probably drunk off their ass at the time. Not making this up. ****Washington’s foreign policy was, in a nutshell, “America First”. It’s an inconvenient truth, but Washington had very little to no interest in getting involved in the affairs of other countries, not even in offering simple aid. To be fair, his reasons were probably sound. The U.S. was, after all, a baby country in comparison to the thousand-year-old countries in Europe. We had a lot of growing up to do before we could sit at the grown-up table. ****Slavery was a complicated issue for Washington. Unfortunately, racism was the norm for most if not all white people. Having enlightened thoughts like “black people are people, too” or “slavery was wrong, period” was, actually, the very rare exceptions to the rule. Still, Washington’s views on slavery did evolve over time. They just evolved extremely slowly and without having any real effect on his actions or policies regarding the horrible institution. He did, however, write a last will and testament that freed his slaves after his death. There’s a lot more good stuff in this, these were just a few highlights. ...more |
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1
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Mar 27, 2020
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Apr 2020
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Mar 04, 2020
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Hardcover
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1400032539
| 9781400032532
| 1400032539
| 3.96
| 42,944
| 2004
| Nov 08, 2005
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it was amazing
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If the only thing you actually know about George Washington is that he chopped down a cherry tree in his youth and didn’t lie about it, then you may b
If the only thing you actually know about George Washington is that he chopped down a cherry tree in his youth and didn’t lie about it, then you may be in the majority of sadly misinformed and ignorant Americans. I am, unfortunately, among that majority. Besides being the very first president of these United States and being somewhat of an important player in the American Revolution, Washington actually did other stuff. He actually had a life outside of having his face on the dollar bill. Unfortunately, Washington’s life has been shrouded and mystified in a false impression of a stoic, emotionless, larger-than-life figure. For many Americans, Washington is like John Henry or Paul Bunyan: a folk legend whose existence and exploits have entered a realm of unreality and unbelievability. Joseph J. Ellis, in his biography “His Excellency”, attempts to de-mystify the legend of Washington and shine a light on the real man, not the unknowable god-like figure that we see in the famous portraits of him. Ellis succeeds where other biographers may have failed perhaps because he does not view Washington through the lenses of idolatry and utter reverence. Not that Ellis shows any disrespect or lack of admiration for the man. He simply shows Washington as just that: a man. One with just as many foibles and dysfunctions and hang-ups as any other man. Ellis also succeeds in keeping it short (a mere 275 pages), by not going into lengthy detail and not focusing on the boring minutiae that occasionally bogs down similar presidential biographies. (For example, while I respect the brilliance of Edmund Morris, I have been stuck at the midway point of “Theodore Rex”, his second volume of a three-volume biography of Theodore Roosevelt, for almost a decade now. Holy shit, Mr. Morris, I don’t need to know what he had for breakfast or what books he read every damned day.) Washington, according to Ellis, has been unfairly treated by history for several reasons. One is that he was kind of a quiet guy. While he did write gorgeous letters when he actually wrote letters, the fact is that he was nowhere near as prolific as some of his contemporaries, like Thomas Jefferson. Indeed, Washington made an effort to destroy most of his letters before his death; a sad fact for historians but perhaps ideal for a man who was known for sitting in on meetings and rarely uttering a word. He was a listener, not a talker. Unfortunately, according to Ellis, historians don’t really like quiet people. They like people like Jefferson who didn’t know when to shut the fuck up. They like people who wrote a shit-ton of letters and journals and purposely kept them sequestered away until their deaths, with every intention of having them posthumously published. Those are the kinds of guys historians get off on. Guys like Washington are a bit of a mystery. They don’t know what to do with them. He also had a reputation for being always honest, which is where that whole “cherry tree” legend comes from. It’s bullshit, by the way, according to Ellis. It never happened. The truth is, Washington was simply straightforward. He was, in today’s parlance, authentic. A rare quality in any age. This doesn’t mean, however, that Washington didn’t have a private life. Indeed, his reputation for being somewhat staid and stoic was a fairly contrived persona. The truth, according to Ellis, was that Washington was ruled by his passions---probably moreso than others of his day---but he was much better at keeping his passions controlled. Unlike Jefferson (again with this guy), Washington knew how to keep it in his pants. Sure, Washington had plenty of opportunities for extramarital affairs, with other politicians’ wives as well as the hundred or so slaves he kept in his lifetime as a Virginia plantation owner, but by all accounts, he was a gentleman in the truest sense of the word. Keep in mind, too, the guy was well over six feet tall and built like a modern-day linebacker, minus the use of steroids, so it’s not like he didn’t have the equipment to play the game. History has also unfairly painted him as an embodiment of the perfect commanding officer, one who never gave a questionable order or made a questionable decision. It’s patently untrue. Much of his early military escapades were filled with snafus and horrendous fuck-ups. He just learned from his failures rather than dwell on them. Sadly, two of the most important things Washington ever did are essentially two things that most people have forgotten. One is his refusal to run for a third term. Keep in mind that Washington was the FIRST president of the U.S. He could have done whatever the fuck he wanted in office, mainly because the position was so new. He could have run for a third term, and, according to Ellis, he most likely would have won with a landslide. He was that popular. Instead, Washington did what he felt was right for the country, not what he felt was right for himself. Read that last sentence again. When the fuck was the last time we had a president who did anything that wasn’t motivated by self-interest? The other thing for which he should be remembered is his last will and testament. Throughout his life, Washington kept slaves. He thought very little of the fact that these slaves were actually people. Until the Revolution. His views on slavery changed somewhat as he got older, and while he never fully embraced the movement, he was known to harbor pro-abolitionist sentiments. In his lifetime, Washington never had the courage to free his slaves. There were so many legal and financial complications involved that he never really tried. He did, however, stipulate in his will that his slaves were to be freed upon his death. Sadly, due to the family contesting some of the things in his will, only one of his slaves was actually ever freed (https://www.history.com/news/did-geor...), but Washington deserves credit for the (for his time) revolutionary attempt at setting free slaves. Washington was far from a perfect human being, but that’s a good thing. People who are too close to perfect (or at least think that they are---and we all know people who think that) simply aren’t fascinating subjects for biographies. Ellis knows that, which is why the ironically-titled “His Excellency” (a term thrust upon Washington and one that he hated, because it sounded too much like royalty) gives Washington the chance to finally step down off that pedestal and join the ranks of us imperfect Americans. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Mar 13, 2020
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Mar 17, 2020
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Mar 04, 2020
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Paperback
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045149783X
| 9780451497833
| 045149783X
| 4.03
| 1,994
| Sep 12, 2017
| Sep 12, 2017
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it was amazing
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Dylan Jones, the editor of the British edition of GQ magazine, published “David Bowie: A Life” in 2017, a year after Bowie’s death in January 2016. As
Dylan Jones, the editor of the British edition of GQ magazine, published “David Bowie: A Life” in 2017, a year after Bowie’s death in January 2016. As someone who has read several biographies, critical analyses, philosophical ramblings, and uncategorizable miscellenia about Bowie (and there is a shockingly huge amount of material out there on the subject), I was, perhaps, not expecting much. At least, not much in the sense of much more than I’ve already studied, learned, and appreciated about Bowie. Fortunately, Jones has done something rather clever and excellent. Rather than write a straight biography about Bowie in which Jones, the biographer, editorializes and comments and attempts to dissect the subject, he has written an oral biography in which he lets dozens of Bowie’s childhood friends, relatives, bandmates, former lovers, managers, publicists, limo drivers, critics, fans, haters, and contemporaries do it for him. Jones apparently interviewed 182 people for this book. He also drew from seven in-depth interviews with Bowie over the years, along with many other well-known interviews. He simply lets people speak, with some (although surprisingly little) of his own editorializing. While this may sound like one of those videos that your cousin makes at your wedding, in which they get everyone to say a few words about how they know you and what they love about you, the resultant book is actually incredibly profound, immensely readable, and beautifully moving. It’s also perfectly appropriate for an icon like Bowie, a man who was, still is, and probably will forever be an enigma. Therein lies the joy and excitement of Jones’s book. For every piece of well-known history about Bowie’s amazing life, there is, I’m sure, for many other fans, something in this book that will be new, shocking, and eye-opening about the man that we honestly didn’t think could shock or surprise us any more. There is also so much more than that, though. Jones clearly loved and respected Bowie the man as well as the musician and the celebrity, enough to know that he was far from perfect. Bowie, like everyone, had dark sides to his character. He had skeletons in his closet, some of which we have some clues about, others we may never know. He was, after all, a human being, despite his life-long partly-tongue-in-cheek, partly-serious attempt to cultivate a persona of an otherworldly type, a permanent outsider, the Alien/Starman. As a life-long Bowie fan, I can honestly say that my love for the man extends beyond just the music and liner notes; my love for Bowie encompasses everything about him: foibles, dark sides, and imperfections included. “David Bowie: A Life” is an absolute must-read for any Bowiephile. ...more |
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Dec 17, 2018
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Dec 25, 2018
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Dec 17, 2018
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Hardcover
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0307338444
| 9780307338440
| 0307338444
| 3.99
| 363
| Jan 01, 2005
| Jun 27, 2006
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it was amazing
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Russ Meyer took his two loves in life---filmmaking and huge boobs---and made a fairly successful empire out of it. A fascinating man, to say the least
Russ Meyer took his two loves in life---filmmaking and huge boobs---and made a fairly successful empire out of it. A fascinating man, to say the least, Meyer was either a subcultural genius or a pervert with a very specific fetish who got lucky. Jimmy McDonough’s biography of Meyer, “Big Bosoms and Square Jaws”, takes as objective an approach to Meyer’s life as one can get, considering the subject matter. For the most part, he succeeds. His biography is lively, fun, energetic, and straightforward, which is pretty much how I imagine Meyer was during his life. Born in 1922, Meyer grew up in California without a father and with a very strange, very overbearing mother, whom he doted on until her dying day. He also had a younger sister, Lucinda, who suffered from progressive mental illness, one that landed her in a psychiatric facility in her later years. Strangely, these two women in his life were ever-present and extremely important throughout his life, and they set the tone for his innumerable relationships with women. Through multiple divorces, tumultuous relationships with starlets, horribly vicious lawsuits, and, ultimately, a highly contested estate situation, Meyer’s women in life have either been his saviors, his biggest fans, or, occasionally, his worst enemy. Arguably, Meyer himself was his own worst enemy at times. Meyer found a taste for filmmaking during World War II as a combat photographer for the 166th Signal Photo Company. It was there, in Europe, during some of the bloodiest and most life-threatening situations that Meyer also developed some of his closest and longest-lasting friendships with the other men in his company. Indeed, he remained close to most of them until his death in 2004, making sure to invite them to all of his film premieres, weddings, and parties, and, later in life, making an effort to attend their funerals. Staff Sergeant Meyer wasn’t one to gush emotionally, but his fellow brothers-in-arms of the 166th always managed to bring a smile to his face or a tear in his eye. Back at home, after the war, Meyer was set on being a Hollywood filmmaker. Cutting his teeth as cinematographer for a few relatively forgotten independent films, Meyer’s first feature film was a low-budget “nudie” film, “The Immoral Mr. Teas”. While it only ran on the independent/exploitation circuit (which, in 1959, was extremely limited), the film still managed to rake in more than $1 million. Meyer never liked to consider himself a pornographer, especially in later years when hard-core and video porn became extremely popular and more easily accessible. He always thought hard-core was gauche, which may seem ironic coming from a man who once said, “The Great American Dream is to run into a woman that has no principles whatsoever---and a greedy pussy.” Still, by today’s standards, many of his earlier films are relatively tame. Heavy on the nudity but rather soft-core, at best, in the sex department, Meyer’s films were actually reliant on story and pretty unique camera-work. Granted, his story-telling was weird and often incomprehensible, as he injected some symbolism and imagery that was meant to be understand by Meyer only. His films were, essentially, in-jokes of his own psyche. When Meyer was hired on by a major studio---20th Century Fox---in 1969, it was a huge risk for both Meyer and the studio. With a screenplay by a young Roger Ebert, and a gorgeous new Hollywood starlet named Edy Williams (who eventually became Meyer’s third wife), “Beyond the Valley of the Dolls” hit theaters in 1970. Controversial to say the least (the film is known for being the first film to earn an “X” rating by the newly formed Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) rating system), “Beyond the Valley of the Dolls”, while not a critical success, still managed to make $9 million domestically on a budget of roughly $90,000. Not bad considering most upscale suburbanites and good church-going folk of America wrote it off as sleaze and smut. (Still, someone was going to see the movie.) Several unsuccessful movies followed, mostly due to an attempt by Meyer to attract a “high-brow” crowd. Finally, Meyer got sick of trying to film other people’s words and went back to writing his own films. He got back into the grindhouse and immediately starting making movies that his fans wanted to see. Meyer’s basic philosophy about women in film was simple: women who took off their clothes was great. Women with enormous funbags who took off their clothes was even greater. His list of cinematic giant hooters is a who’s who of “nudie” film starlets: Eve Meyer (his first wife), Tura Satana, Lorna Maitland, Rena Horten, Haji, Alaina Capri, Erica Gavin, Uschi Digard, June Mack, Kitten Natividad, Melissa Mounds, Pandora Peaks---all of them found fame (if only about 15 minutes of it) in Meyer’s oeuvre. While many critics write Meyer off as a misogynist, McDonough’s biography dares us to question this. Clearly, McDonough acknowledges, these critics may have a point, but Meyer’s interior life was never an easy one to see. And while he did end up having some strained personal conflicts with individual women in his life, the many women he worked with throughout his filmmaking career almost unanimously agreed that he was a straight-up professional and a gentleman. There are even critics, McDonough points out, who believe that Meyer may have been a deeply-closeted homosexual, and McDonough doesn’t totally discount this theory, based on some compelling evidence. It is, however, ultimately irrelevant, since no one has ever substantiated it. Also, Meyer is now deceased, so we will never know for sure. What we do know is that Meyer had a vision. Yes, one that involved ridiculously large bazongas, but a vision nonetheless. He left behind a legacy of crazy and still-entertaining films, many of which are being taught in film courses on college campuses today. Granted, this either says a lot about Meyer’s films or a lot about today’s college campuses. You decide. ...more |
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Nov 15, 2018
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Nov 17, 2018
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Nov 15, 2018
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Paperback
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3.74
| 50
| unknown
| 2018
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it was ok
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One of the last of the gentleman politicians, Senator John McCain, died this week. It was a sad day for Washington, D.C., and it should have been a sa
One of the last of the gentleman politicians, Senator John McCain, died this week. It was a sad day for Washington, D.C., and it should have been a sad day for the Republican party in general, but most Republicans had distanced themselves from McCain long ago, ever since he stood up and had the audacity to disagree with Trump on so many things. He wasn’t perfect. Being a liberal and a Democrat, I certainly didn’t agree with his stand on many issues, but I still had great respect for McCain. The man was a war hero. Unlike many of his peers, he actually fought in Vietnam. He didn’t rely on rich parents or claim to have “bone spurs” in order to get him deferred. During the 2008 presidential campaign, I came the closest I have ever come to possibly voting for a Republican. My decision, however, was made when he chose Sarah Palin as his running mate, an unmitigated moron who was clearly chosen for political reasons and not because she was in any way qualified. I may have lost some respect for his campaign, but I didn’t lose respect for him. I was happy with my vote for Barack Obama. I still am. McCain, in almost every situation that he was in, handled himself with an aplomb and a respectful manner that was befitting of his position. The same can’t be said for many of his Republican colleagues. Why am I writing about McCain in a review of a book about Vice President Mike Pence? Mainly to create contrast. While both men were conservative Republicans, the two men were on two very different ends of the spectrum. While both men come from Scots-Irish roots, their upbringing was vastly different. Pence was born in a small Indiana town, McCain on a naval station in Panama. Pence never joined the military and never fought in a war, McCain literally lived his entire life in the military, in some form or another, and served in Vietnam. This is not, by the way, to disparage one or the other. I’m not saying one is better than the other due to ties to the military. I’m simply pointing out a major difference in their upbringing and life experiences; one that, I’m sure, played a major role in shaping the men that they became. While McCain claimed to be religious (he was a life-long Episcopalian until becoming a Baptist in 2007), his religion was---as it is to many Americans---something he didn’t really advertise too much. He may have been extremely religious in his heart, but in his everyday dealings, he was not one to shove his religion down anyone’s throat. Bragging about one’s religion is in poor taste and obnoxious. Pence wore his religion on his sleeve. Indeed, Pence claimed, numerous times, that he was a “Christian” first, followed by “a conservative, and a Republican, in that order”. Pence was a self-admitted “Born-again” who came to Jesus Christ when he was in high school and has been a devout Evangelical throughout his life. It is, in fact, his Christian fundamentalism that has been at the heart of many of his controversial decisions as Congressman and Indiana governor, including leading the campaign for a religious freedom act and helping to devise some of the strongest anti-abortion bills in the country. He has been on record as saying, “I’d like to see Roe v. Wade overturned and consigned to the ash heap of history.” He also made a name for himself, in a negative way, among the LGBTQ community for trying to push through a bill in Indiana that would strip gay people of any legal rights they may have in domestic partnerships. Thankfully, this was made moot by the Supreme Court decision that made same-sex legal in all states. The basic difference is that McCain fought to give people rights, Pence fought to take those rights away from certain people. If there was an American score-card for patriotism and constitutionality, I’m pretty sure McCain has had far more boxes checked off. Andrea Neal’s biography “Pence: The Path to Power” is, like her subject, dry and unexciting. Pence comes across as a nice conservative church-going family guy from the white-bread ‘burbs of Middle America, but hiding between the lines of Neal’s story of Pence is a frightening ambition and self-righteous entitlement that scares the bejesus out of people like me: liberal, lower-income, ethnic. That Pence has latched himself permanently in history to the scandalous and disgusting coat-tails of a cretin like Trump is quite telling. That Pence may very well be the next president, by default, is horrifying. ...more |
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not set
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Aug 26, 2018
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Aug 28, 2018
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Hardcover
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1250217415
| 9781250217417
| 1250217415
| 3.50
| 372
| unknown
| Aug 28, 2018
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liked it
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I’ll keep this short, mainly because I’m sure you’re all as sick of reading my reviews of these political books as I am of writing them and reading th
I’ll keep this short, mainly because I’m sure you’re all as sick of reading my reviews of these political books as I am of writing them and reading them. (It’s become a bit of an obsession, one that I can’t explain other than the need to be completely informed and knowledgable about this stuff to bolster my arguments when Trump supporters ask me why I detest Trump and his ilk so much.) Michael D’Antonio and Peter Eisner’s “The Shadow President: The Truth About Mike Pence” is much better than Andrea Neal’s “Pence: The Path to Power” primarily because Neal’s biography was too soft and ended up reading, a times, like glowing campaign literature (which it was). “The Shadow President” digs much deeper into Pence’s dirty little closet, which, frankly, isn’t that dirty, and yet Pence still comes across as frightening as hell. Here’s my reasoning for detesting Pence: He’s a two-faced Christian. I’m personally not one to swoon or say “halleluia!” when someone tells me that they have been “saved” and have devoted their life to Jesus Christ. It doesn’t mean anything to me. It doesn’t tell me that you are a good person. It just tells me that I know not to plan anything with you on a Sunday morning. It tells me that I should probably cool it with the dropping of f-bombs around you or your kids. It tells me that maybe I should avoid telling abortion jokes to you. That’s it. I have known plenty of Christians in my life, some of whom are the biggest assholes in the world. Thusly, I have known plenty of atheists and non-Christians in my life, many of whom are some of the kindest, most morally upstanding people I have ever known. So, yeah, whether or not you are Christian doesn’t mean shit to me. Pence may claim to be a good, devout Christian who goes to church every Sunday, reads the Bible, prays for an hour each morning, and refuses to be alone in a room with a woman other than his wife, but that doesn’t mean that he’s a good person. I mean, he may be, but calling yourself “Christian” doesn’t give you an automatic in. And the truth is, Pence’s actions, or in some cases lack thereof, belie otherwise. Believe it or not, I consider myself a Christian. I may be a shitty one, but I try to live my life according to some of the main tenets of Christ’s teaching. My favorite one? “Love thy neighbor”. Now, in the name of full disclosure, I should say that I don’t really talk to my neighbors on either side. We’ve had some disputes in the past about lawn maintenance and building permits, some of which got heated, so I’m not exactly practicing what I’m preaching. But I dig the sentiment. Pence claims to love thy neighbor, but he’s spent an entire political career trying to make life miserable for his neighbors, especially if they happen to be homosexual, non-white, immigrants, or women. In a nutshell, I could care less if you think homosexuals are aberrations of nature or black people are inferior to white people or women who have had abortions should go to hell. Whatever. To each his or her own, I say. UNTIL you start trying to push your stupid beliefs and moral views on the rest of us by creating laws that inhibit or strip away basic human rights from groups of people. Pence, while governor of Indiana, tried to propose some of the most egregiously hateful anti-gay and anti-abortion legislation in the country. As if that wasn’t bad enough, Pence has hitched a ride on Trump’s coattails and become the biggest sycophant in the Trump Administration. Pence keeps quiet whenever Trump does anything that is not very Christian (which is everything he does), and, in some cases, praises Trump for shit that anyone with a brain recognizes as horrible. I just pray that when Mueller lowers the boom, he gets Pence as well as Trump. We don’t need an asshole like Pence running our country either. ...more |
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Oct 30, 2018
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Oct 31, 2018
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Jul 29, 2018
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Audio CD
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0307700275
| 9780307700278
| 0307700275
| 4.13
| 533
| Feb 28, 2017
| Feb 28, 2017
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it was amazing
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Mental illness is trending throughout the news threads these days, but it isn’t necessarily trending in a helpful way. People on both sides of the gun
Mental illness is trending throughout the news threads these days, but it isn’t necessarily trending in a helpful way. People on both sides of the gun debate seem to agree that mental health issues should be addressed in a better way than it is currently being addressed, which is, of course, not at all. The problem is in the stigma, misinformation, and stereotypes that still plague the general public regarding mental illness. Our knowledge of mental illness---who it affects, what it is, how to treat it---has improved somewhat in the past century, ever since psychiatry and psychology have been accepted (somewhat) as real science, but what we don’t understand about the mind and its many tendencies to malfunction has continued to be a problem for many people, not the least of which are the people suffering from mental illnesses. The stigma that made mental illness such a taboo subject for centuries, forcing families to dump loved ones in horrible insane asylums and institutions where they would stay locked up until they died, still exists in the embarrassment and shame many people have when it comes to talking about their own illness. Even the millions who suffer from the most mild forms of depression are still, sometimes, hesitant to talk about it, and rightfully so, when so many people don’t understand that depression isn’t simply “feeling sad” and that a good cry and some positive thinking isn’t nearly enough to cure it. Misinformation abounds in the public forum mainly because this stigma still lingers. Vocal anti-psychiatry advocates like Tom Cruise---who claims that psychiatry is a “pseudoscience”, that chemical imbalances in the brain are “imaginary”, and that psychotherapy is “dangerous”---unfortunately have weight in many people’s minds because they, themselves, don’t know much about psychology and because, well, Cruise’s stultifyingly misinformed (and Scientology-based) contrariness resonates with a burgeoning anti-intellectualism in this country. It doesn’t help that Hollywood still can’t seem to provide a portrayal of mental illness that doesn’t fall into one of two camps: 1) psychopathic killers, or 2) frighteningly pathetic victims of a tortured psyche whose only recourse is a strait-jacket and a padded cell. What about the millions of mentally ill people who still manage to lead productive lives? What about the millions of people who, in some cases, see their mental illness as not necessarily a bad thing? Thankfully, occasionally, a movie or a book will get it right. Kay Redfield Jamison’s biography/case study/literary analysis, “Robert Lowell: Setting the River on Fire” is notable and excellent for many reasons. Besides being beautifully written, Jamison also comes from an extremely informed position in her approach toward the poet, Lowell. She is not only the Dalio Family Professor in Mood Disorders and a professor of psychiatry at John Hopkins University School of Medicine, she is also a professor of English at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. She is uniquely qualified to speak about both Lowell’s life-long struggle with bipolar disorder and his body of work as a poet. Lowell was born on March 1, 1917 in Boston, Massachusetts. From a young age, Lowell felt compelled to be a writer, and not just any writer. He wanted to be a poet; THE poet. By all accounts, including those of his closest friends and family, he had a deep compulsion and drive inside him, one that strived for perfection and deeper thinking. Sadly, he also had inside him a disorder that would plague him for his entire life. This disorder manifested itself in long periods of restlessness, sleeplessness, uncontrolled speech, physical violence, a brain that wouldn’t shut off, hyperactive libido, complete lack of inhibition, and a total dismissal of moral structure. When this ran its course, it was immediately followed by a long period of inactivity, exhaustion (physical and mental), and feelings of extreme guilt and self-loathing. For decades, this disorder went by the name of manic-depressive disorder. In 1980, the nomenclature was changed to “bipolar” disorder. Lowell’s case was textbook bipolarism: prolonged periods of manic highs followed by near-suicidal lows. Over the years, Lowell learned to recognize the signs of oncoming mania, and his friends and family did as well. Oftentimes, he was able to check himself into hospitals for treatment. Occasionally, he was sent there against his will when his mania became too out of hand. While his manic episodes were trying times for friends and family, Lowell found a way to at least take advantage of them. He wrote much of his poetry in mania-fueled marathon writing sessions. Many of these poems found their way into award-winning books, such as “Life Studies”, considered by many critics to be Lowell’s best book of poetry as well as a classic in 20th-century American literature. It is amazing to think that Lowell, even through the roughest episodes of mania, managed to write some of his best work. It is, however, in the history of artistry and insanity, not unheard of or unusual. Jamison writes about the growing scientific evidence that links positive mood increases with increases in creativity. Lowell’s experience with his manic episodes throughout his life seem to illustrate this and is supported by the scientific evidence. When lithium was discovered to be highly effective in treating mania and depression, Lowell was an early beneficiary of the drug. It worked extremely well for him, and it helped keep his manic episodes at bay for longer periods of time. Sadly, though, it was not a cure. Lowell would suffer manic-depressive episodes for the rest of his life until his death on September 12, 1977. He died of a heart attack brought on by heart disease that most likely had its roots in his life-long struggle with bipolarism. Jamison’s book is certainly an unusual biography in that it is a respectful account of a man’s life, but it isn’t only that. In many ways, it is a biographical account of Lowell’s illness and an examination and overview of the history of manic-depression/bipolar disorder. Interspersed throughout the book are chapters that look at how mania and depression were treated by our ancients, starting as early as the Ancient Greeks, many of whom wrote about the connection between mania and creativity, madness and genius, long before the scientific evidence had been gathered to support it. There is no doubt in Jamison’s mind that Lowell was a genius. There is also no doubt in her mind that Lowell faced his disease with aplomb, courage, and a realistic sense that he would never be cured so he may as well make the best of life, which is what he did. Lowell’s life is, perhaps, a healthy template for people suffering from mental illness, in whatever form it takes but especially in the oft-misunderstood form of bipolarism. Jamison’s book is also an important, compassionate, knowledgable examination of mental illness in general, which is much needed in today’s hair-trigger, anti-intellectual, dispassionate atmosphere that has led to a complete lack of understanding and mistreatment (and, in many cases, absolutely no treatment whatsoever) of the mentally ill. ...more |
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Mar 06, 2018
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Mar 11, 2018
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Mar 06, 2018
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Hardcover
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1594206139
| 9781594206139
| 1594206139
| 4.06
| 5,528
| May 23, 2017
| Jan 01, 2017
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really liked it
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“If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.” ---George Orwell Who knew that democracy’s undoing “If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.” ---George Orwell Who knew that democracy’s undoing in the U.S. would be brought about by football? On the same weekend that thousands of evangelical Christians awaited the Rapture, North Korea’s PSY-look-alike Supreme Leader Kim Jung-Un threatened to possibly retaliate with nuclear weapons due to Trump’s angry tweets, and Puerto Rico suffered the aftermath of a category-5 hurricane, Trump’s main gripe was with the NFL players who were sitting out the National Anthem at football games. The man who gave a pass to white supremacists and Nazis marching in the streets of Virginia derided any black player peacefully protesting the social injustice of police violence as a “son of a bitch”. What started out as one player has turned into a movement, and the vitriol and sheer hatred from football fans has prompted serious debates, on one side, as to whether standing for a National Anthem should be mandatory and that more fans and sponsors should boycott the sport, or the other side, in which the implied (and not-so-implicit) racism of Trump and thousands of rabid fans should be met with still more boycotts of the sport. Basically, boycotting the game of football seems to be the answer to everything. As someone who detests football (and the NFL specifically; sports in general), I think this is all pretty fucking awesome. At the very least, it’s humorous in a way. From another vantage point, however, it’s scary as shit. This is football, a big dumb violent sport: imagine if these people were actually upset about something that mattered? Like, climate change, universal health care, or, hell, even police brutality. This whole issue doesn’t appear to be letting up, and, in fact, appears to be coming toward a pretty violent head. Maybe that’s a necessary thing, if not necessarily a good thing. Conversations (a nice and completely inaccurate word for the tumult that is raging now) about mandating patriotism and punishing people for showing “inadequate” displays of national pride naturally lends itself to topics of fascism and totalitarianism, an issue that Thomas E. Ricks appropriately writes about in his latest book, “Churchill and Orwell: The Fight for Freedom”. Ricks, a veteran war-time journalist for The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post, is the national security advisor at the New America think tank and a contributing editor to Foreign Policy magazine. He is also, apparently, a big fan of democracy and a hater of totalitarianism. In his view, George Orwell and Winston Churchill were the two most important figures in the past hundred years in the war against fascism: “Orwell and Churchill recognized that the key question of their century ultimately was not who controlled the means of production, as Marx thought, or how the human psyche functioned, as Freud taught, but rather how to preserve the liberty of the individual during an age when the state was becoming powerfully intrusive into private life. (p.3)” History, Ricks posits, may have been radically different had Churchill and Orwell never been born or succumbed to an early demise. Both men suffered potentially life-ending incidents early in their career: Churchill in a deadly car accident and Orwell during the Spanish Civil War in which a sniper’s bullet struck him in the neck. Churchill, hated by his own party, was a lone voice of going to war against Nazi Germany in the late 1930s. Most of Britain and Europe subscribed to a policy of appeasement: just give Hitler what he wants and he won’t bother us. Churchill was disgusted by this approach, as he saw it as a slow decay of democracy and liberty in Europe. Had Churchill not eventually become the Prime Minister at the most opportune time, Neville Chamberlain’s policy of kissing Hitler’s ass would have, probably, meant the destruction of England and the rest of Europe. Prior to being shot, Orwell’s reputation as a writer was a tepid one at best, known primarily for several forgettable novels about contemporary English life and a few nonfiction works about poverty. Surviving the Spanish Civil War surprised even himself, but it resulted in the book that would put him on the map, “Homage to Catalonia”, his first-hand accounts in the very confusing, dull, and ultimately upsetting war against the fascist regime of Francisco Franco. Orwell entered the war an idealistic socialist, but he left the war a realist, realizing that fascism can take many forms. Ricks writes, “[T]he theme that runs powerfully through all of Orwell’s writings, from his early work on “Burmese Days” through the late 1930s and then through the great essays, and into “Animal Farm” and “1984”, is the abuse of power in the modern world by both the left and the right. (p.250)” Churchill and Orwell never actually met in person, but both men, in the short times their lives overlapped (Orwell died in 1950; Churchill outlived him another 15 years), admired each other from afar. Orwell, in a review of Churchill’s war memoir “Their Finest Hour”: “The political reminiscences which he has published from time to time have always been a great deal above average, in frankness as well as in literary quality. Churchill is among other things a journalist, with a real if not very discriminating feeling for literature, and he also has a restless, enquiring mind, interested in both concrete facts and in the analysis of motives, sometimes including his own motives. In general, Churchill’s writings are more like those of a human being than of public figure.” Churchill, upon reading “1984” a second time, in 1953: “It is a very remarkable book.” Ricks’s dual biography is not overly comprehensive and it leaves the reader wanting, which is, perhaps, the goal, as it has certainly inspired me to read more about Churchill---a fascinating man---and confirms my belief that Orwell is one of the greatest writers of the 20th century. The takeaway is a simple one, although one that is not simple at all: Resist. Always. Ricks encapsulates the work of these two men into a “two-step process” that is as vital today as it was 80 years ago: “Work diligently to discern the facts of the matter, and then use your principles to respond. (p.265)” ...more |
Notes are private!
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Sep 18, 2017
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Sep 22, 2017
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May 17, 2017
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Hardcover
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1476767076
| 9781476767079
| 1476767076
| 3.05
| 1,034
| Sep 23, 2014
| Sep 23, 2014
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liked it
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The late Wendy Leigh wrote “Bowie: the Biography” two years before Bowie succumbed to cancer. Sadly, Leigh died in June 2016 after falling from the ba
The late Wendy Leigh wrote “Bowie: the Biography” two years before Bowie succumbed to cancer. Sadly, Leigh died in June 2016 after falling from the balcony of her London apartment. It may seem like a book tainted by death, but it is, in fact, a celebration of life. Specifically, it is a celebration of the very fascinating, exuberant, occasionally troubled, but wonderful life of David Bowie. There have literally been dozens of biographies written about Bowie, and I’m sure that since his death, more books about him will be popping up on bookshelves in the near future. Leigh’s biography doesn’t add anything new to the story, but it is an entertaining read nonetheless. One of my complaints about the book may be nothing more than a prudish annoyance I had with Leigh’s apparent obsession with Bowie’s sex life. As rich a topic as that may be to mine, I felt that Leigh bordered on the sensationalistic, lascivious, and prurient. In some parts, she went straight over the border and set up camp. Upon finishing the book, however, my thoughts on the topic have shifted somewhat, and I am beginning to see why Leigh focused her attention throughout the book on Bowie’s sexuality. At the height of his Ziggy Stardust era, Bowie was unabashed about his declaration of bisexuality. His Ziggy persona oozed sexuality, which was the point, but, more importantly, Bowie’s wild and open lifestyle gave voice and a glimmer of hope to millions of young men and women growing up in sexually repressive households, cities, and countries. Bowie was bragging about homosexuality and bisexuality in an era when such things were still, for the most part, underground. It was a topic that was, at the very least, not spoken about in decent company, if at all. That Bowie was accused of being “confused” or “pretentious” was, of course, de rigueur for a rock star of Bowie’s ilk, whose day-to-day sexuality was as ephemeral as his fashion sense. But Bowie, according to Leigh, wasn’t being pretentious with his sexuality. He simply didn’t seem to have many inhibitions when it came to whom he slept with. Leigh spends a lot of time on the sexual relationships Bowie had with record producers, agents, and other rock stars. Some of her anecdotes are merely speculation---his short-lived affair with Mick Jagger, for instance, was never substantiated despite rampant rumors. The real question is: who cares? I personally didn’t care who Bowie slept with, nor would I give the book much credence if all Leigh was doing was writing a who’s-who of everyone bedded or blown by Bowie. Thankfully, Leigh was leading up to the climax (no pun intended) of her story: Bowie’s introduction to, and subsequent marriage with, Iman. Apparently, marriage and monogamy eventually suited Bowie well. He was, by all accounts that counted (namely Iman), a loving and doting husband. He was also a very loving and affectionate father to his son, Duncan (from his previous marriage with Mary Angela Barnett) and daughter, Alexandria. Leigh’s book attempts to demonstrate that even a sexually wild rock star like Bowie can find love and happiness in a monogamous relationship. ...more |
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Nov 27, 2016
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Dec 06, 2016
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030759243X
| 9780307592439
| 030759243X
| 3.93
| 9,292
| Apr 13, 2010
| Apr 13, 2010
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really liked it
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“What writers have is a license and also the freedom to sit---to sit, clench their fists, and make themselves be excruciatingly aware of the stuff tha
“What writers have is a license and also the freedom to sit---to sit, clench their fists, and make themselves be excruciatingly aware of the stuff that we’re mostly aware of only on a certain level. And that if the writer does his job right, what he basically does is remind the reader of how smart the reader is. Is to wake the reader up to stuff that the reader’s been aware of all the time. And it’s not a question of the writer having more capacity than the average person... It’s that the writer is willing I think to cut off, cut himself off from certain stuff and develop... and just, and think really hard. What not everyone has the luxury to do. (p. 41)” In 1996, author David Lipsky embarked on a five-day road trip/interview with David Foster Wallace, in which the two waxed philosophical on everything from addiction, fame, sex, television, “Die Hard”, Alanis Morrisette, the current state of American literature, the meaning of life and death, and Wallace’s book, “Infinite Jest”. Lipsky had intended to write a full-length cover feature for Rolling Stone, the magazine for which he was working at the time. It never actually appeared, which for the shy, new-to-fame anti-celebrity Wallace was probably for the best. Several years, a few more books, a marriage, and a long-fought battle with severe depression later, Wallace committed suicide by hanging himself in his living room one day in September 2008. Saddened by the news, Lipsky dug out the tape-recorded interview of that ’96 road trip, transcribed it, and published it in 2010 under the title “Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself”. Several years later, the book was made into a movie called “The End of the Tour” with an excellent performance by Jason Segel as Wallace. The book is exactly what one would expect from a road trip interview with Wallace: heady, intellectual, somewhat pretentious, fascinating, enlightening, depressing, and humorous. There is no doubt that Wallace was a genius, literary or otherwise. His book, “Infinite Jest”, a 1,000-plus page magnum opus remains my Mt. Everest of books. The farthest I have ever read in the book was about 400 pages before I was utterly stymied. It is a book which captivates and infuriates in equal measure. The writing is clearly beautiful, but the book is so dense with information and written in such a bizarrely experimental fashion that, at times, it is almost unreadable. For me. I have heard some people say that they did not have a problem reading the book at all. I hate these people. Anyway, upon the publication of “Infinite Jest”, which nearly broke the publishing industry and thrust Wallace into an unprecedented rock star-like fame (at least among his fellow literary cognoscenti), Wallace was uncertain and not at all prepared to deal with his new life; a life which didn’t look all that different from his old life except that now he was on the cover of TIME magazine. Lipsky’s interview reveals a candid down-to-Earth “regular guy” in Wallace, a talented writer who knows he has a gift while at the same time questioning whether he deserves it. Of course, Lipsky questions whether the “regular guy” is a persona that Wallace is simply trying to create to hide his troubled genius. Wallace’s mind works on a different level than most humans, according to Lipsky. It is always working, always processing, always thinking, always on. As someone who has dealt with clinical depression (although admittedly nowhere near the level of Wallace), I can relate to that feeling. For me, though, it was manageable, and it was never something that lasted long periods of time. I have lived most of my life in periods of clarity. I think, for Wallace, his experience was the opposite. His struggle was a life-long one, and, in the end, his depression beat him. Wallace’s genius was his ability to channel that uncontrollable tumultuous mind, rein it in and create some amazing literature. Lipsky, thankfully, did not do much editing or parsing of Wallace’s words. He wrote the entire interview verbatim with limited editorializing. Occasionally he would set the scene or add a few details (songs playing on the radio in the background, Wallace’s facial gestures at the time, etc.) He just lets Wallace talk, and Wallace was a great talker. One of the things that Wallace was great at doing, in his writing, was extrapolation. In the few parts of “Infinite Jest” that I actually read, Wallace imagines a future in which we have essentially destroyed ourselves---our society, our culture, our world---through overindulgence with entertainment; entertainment as an addiction. Wallace saw the writing on the wall. He saw the stirrings, in ’96, of evening news being guided not by a pursuit of truth but by ratings and entertainment value. He foresaw the coming of social media like Facebook and Twitter; a nation of people staring into glowing screens, believing that they are connecting to the world when in reality they are more alone than ever. He imagined a world in which real Art was dead, supplanted by dime-store entertainment that offered no substance or lasting value. And while Wallace could not have foreseen the 2016 election year or its candidates, he nevertheless eerily predicted a scenario in which a Donald Trump presidency was a possibility: “The thing that really scares me about this country---and again, I’d want you to stress, I’m a private citizen, I am not a pundit. Is I think we’re really setting ourselves for repression and fascism. I think our hunger, our hunger to have somebody else tell us what to do---or for some sort of certainty, or something to steer by---is getting so bad, um, that I think it’s, there’s even a, [Friedrich] Hayek’s Road to Serfdom, I mean, makes a similar argument economically. But I think, you know, in Pat Buchanan, in Rush Limbaugh, there are rumbles on the Western horizon, you know. And that it’s going to be, that the next few decades are going to be really scary. Particularly if things get economically shaky, and people for instance---people who’ve never been hungry before, might be hungry or might be cold. (p. 158)” ...more |
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Oct 24, 2016
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Oct 28, 2016
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Oct 24, 2016
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Paperback
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0804136750
| 9780804136754
| 0804136750
| 3.62
| 1,456
| Jan 01, 2014
| Feb 11, 2014
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liked it
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The Hillary-haters and conspiracy theorists love to throw around the term “career politician” nowadays with the same disgust and loathing that most pe
The Hillary-haters and conspiracy theorists love to throw around the term “career politician” nowadays with the same disgust and loathing that most people use with the term “pedophile”, which is probably really unfair to pedophiles. Joking aside, I understand people’s frustration with the status quo politicians in Washington, D.C. I sympathize with the need for radical change. I get it. That’s why I supported Bernie Sanders. It’s also why a lot of people support Donald Trump. Then, Hillary Clinton won the Democratic nomination, and, while she wasn’t my first choice, I decided to support her because she has the potential to be a good president, especially if she maintains the ideals of the current party platform which Sanders helped to establish as well as avoiding the pitfalls that Obama ran into in terms of being unable to bridge the partisan divide. So, in answer to your next question: yes, I am voting for the party and not necessarily for the person. But I’m also voting for Hillary, the person, because you can’t just vote for an ideal or a platform. I’m voting for Hillary because I truly believe that she will maintain the ideals of the platform or at least try, because she’s savvy enough to know that the country’s eyes and the eyes of the millions of progressive Bernie supporters are on her, making sure she will be accountable. I’m voting for Hillary because she has a track record for successfully working both sides of the aisle, unlike Obama, and I have a pretty good feeling that she will have far less stonewalling this time around. I’m voting for Hillary because I’d rather have a career politician than a man who admits---on live TV---that he doesn’t pay taxes and that he’s proud of it. I’m voting for Hillary because I have yet to hear anyone answer---not just adequately but AT ALL---the question of what crimes she is allegedly guilty. I am voting for Hillary because she has been a tireless supporter of children’s rights, women’s rights, and civil rights since her law school days. She has evolved on some issues, such as LGBQT rights, and while I don’t agree with her on everything (she’s more hawkish and pro-military than I’d prefer), I don’t see any issue that she supports that is a deal-breaker for me. She’s not a perfect candidate, certainly, but no candidate is. She is, however, in my opinion, far superior in every way to Trump. Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes’ 2014 book “HRC: State Secrets and the Rebirth of Hillary Clinton” is an objective (for the most part) in-depth examination of Hillary Clinton’s job performance as the second most powerful person in the U.S. government after the president, covering primarily her four years as Secretary of State. It’s a decent follow-up to Don Van Natta Jr. and Jeff Gerth’s 2007 book “Her Way: The Hopes and Ambitions of Hillary Clinton”, which was a less in-depth, more broad overview of Hillary’s life up until her failed 2008 presidential run. “HRC” basically picks up where “Her Way” left off. Allen/Parnes tells a pretty detailed journalistic account of Hillary’s actions, starting with her run for the presidency and subsequent dropping out of the race, her reluctance to commit to accepting the Secretary of State position at first, and her many trips to the 112 countries she visited as SecState. (She was the most-travelled Secretary of State in history until John Kerry broke her record.) All of this reportage is well and good, if a bit dry. While it’s insightful to read about how Hillary learned to use technology to her advantage, helped to promote women’s rights in countries like Burma and Pakistan, and was integral in the plan to assassinate Osama bin Laden, I think most readers were sloughing their way through this stuff to get to the part they really wanted to know about: Benghazi. Let’s be honest: Benghazi is, unfortunately, the only issue that seems to matter in the minds of most Hillary-haters. I won’t even get into the e-mail scandals (and Allen/Parnes don’t bring it up at all in the book, probably owing to the fact that the “scandals” didn’t break until after publication. Still, if you’re interested in reading about the hypocrisy of the Republicans and the 22 million deleted e-mails under George W. Bush’s presidency, check out this: http://www.pbs.org/weta/washingtonwee...) and I refuse to dignify the ridiculous conspiracy theories that surround Hillary, such as the one that suggests that Hillary has killed more than 30 people, which probably makes her one of the most successful serial killers in history, considering she has gotten away with it this long and built a pretty impressive political career despite the fact. The sad truth is Benghazi was a horrible tragedy that resulted in the senseless loss of four American lives, a tragedy that was utilized for political reasons during an election year. Mistakes were made by many people in the State Department and misinformation was given to the public shrouded as fact. Whether intentional or simply bad information at the time is almost irrelevant. Even Hillary acknowledges this. She has said, on record, that she takes responsibility for the tragedy. It’s not enough, though, for many people. Critics and Hillary-haters want to see her burn for the tragedy, despite the fact that more embassy attacks and deaths occurred under George W. Bush’s watch than Obama’s, and no one ever questioned or attacked Bush to the extent that Hillary has been attacked. (http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-met...) What I, personally, have come to conclude is that when horrible shit like this happens, it’s natural to want to find someone to blame, and if criminal wrongdoing or negligence was the real reason, an in-depth investigation is necessary for bringing the truth out. When 9/11 happened, and in the years afterwards, I wanted to blame the Bush Administration, and I did, vociferously. I hated Bush with a passion, because I honestly believed that he---and everyone in his administration---was asleep at the wheel for the first nine months of his first term. When the U.S. entered the Iraq War, I honestly believed that Bush/Cheney et al had lied to the American people to create momentum for getting involved in the war. I was for impeachment. I was for having them face imprisonment for war crimes. To some extent, I still am. But, as time passes and as I think about the stresses and challenges that a president faces on a daily basis, I now honestly believe that there are some things that no amount of preparation can withstand. Some things just happen so quickly that once it starts it’s impossible to stop. Could things have been done differently? Should there have been a stronger response to credible intelligence reports warning about potential problems? Of course, in hindsight, the answer is always “yes”. Unfortunately, presidents don’t have precognition. They aren’t endowed with superpowers. They are human. Has Hillary made mistakes? Yes. Has she owned up to them, and is she probably more prone to taking cautious, pre-emptive measures in the future to prevent similar mistakes? I believe that she has, and that she will. HRC isn’t the perfect candidate but, in truth, no candidate is ever perfect. She is, for better or worse, my candidate. ...more |
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Sep 29, 2016
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Sep 20, 2016
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Hardcover
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1250042380
| 9781250042385
| 1250042380
| 3.54
| 784
| Sep 22, 2015
| Sep 22, 2015
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really liked it
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Donald Trump supporters love the idea that they support Trump because he “says things that most people are afraid to say”, which, on the face of it, s
Donald Trump supporters love the idea that they support Trump because he “says things that most people are afraid to say”, which, on the face of it, sounds great as a testament to his blunt, brutally honest lack of political correctness but, in reality, tends to point out the fact that, if true, then “most people” are walking around with extremely racist, misogynistic, and xenophobic thoughts that they know are unhealthy or wrong, otherwise they wouldn’t be afraid to voice them. This is NOT something for which Trump should be commended. Actually, there is very little for which Trump should be commended, as he stands among a very small but powerful group known as “celebutards” (a term that my cousin probably didn’t invent but I’m going to give her the credit anyway) that includes the Kardashians, the Desperate Housewives (all of them), anyone who has starred on “The Bachelor” or “The Bachelorette”, those guys on “Duck Dynasty”, and Ryan Seacrest. These are basically people with no innate talent or any real reason to live but have somehow managed to gain fame and fortune way beyond their just deserts. Journalist and author Michael D’Antonio had the privilege (a term used loosely here) to interview Trump for a book about him. He managed to rope about ten good interviews before Trump, in (as D’Antonio called it) “mean girl style”, stopped the interviews and threatened to sue him for libel. For a book he hadn’t written yet. This is, according to D’Antonio, pretty normal behavior for Trump. Originally titled “Never Enough: Donald Trump and the Pursuit of Success” and published last year, “The Truth About Trump” is less of a biography than it is a case study of an incredibly dangerous---albeit somewhat charming---asshole. D’Antonio, who has won a Pulitzer Prize for journalism and has published 16 books, has too much class to call Trump an “asshole”. He’s actually pretty nice to the guy, actually going so far as to call Trump a real estate developer, as if that’s actually what Trump does. To be fair, even D’Antonio hints, more than a few times, that Trump’s real (and only) talent is shameless self-promotion. He gets it naturally, apparently, being the son of Fred Trump, a man who was notorious for extremely unethical business practices that made him a shitload of money and screwed over a lot of people, all carefully calculated within the bounds of legality. Trump is, according to D’Antonio, a product of the wealthy Baby Boom generation who grew up not really wanting for anything. Tough, individualistic, and arrogant, Trump was born to be Trump. He managed to come into his own during a very volatile time in American history: Vietnam, the Civil Rights movement, feminism, Watergate. He grew up watching the “Leave it to Beaver” innocence of the 1950s devolve into a mistrustful and conspiracy-rich world that was the late-‘60s and early-‘70s. It was a transition period in which “[f]ully 70 percent of those polled in the early 1960s said they had faith in their political leaders. By the early 1980s only 25 percent expressed the same sentiment. (p. 125)” Trump took advantage of the tumultuous zeitgeist. For him, it was a new golden era of always striking while the iron is hot: “Although many felt unmoored by the events of the seventies, young Donald Trump would consider Watergate and the lies told to justify the Vietnam War evidence of the world as it was---dangerous, corrupt, and full of intrigue. An intensely competitive young man who believed he was superior to others, Trump accepted that people would seek advantages wherever they could find them. (p.125)” Trump took the words of fictional character Gordon Gekko (Wall Street, 1987)---”Greed, for lack of a better word, is good”---to heart. Greed was good to Trump. Greed was his mantra. Greed was his philosophy. It helped that one of Trump’s primary personality traits---narcissism---helped in alleviating any crises of conscience he might have experienced in his numerous business deals. Guilt was not something Trump has ever succumbed to. Guilt is a sign of weakness. The 1980s was a weird time of corporate and social corruption. Morality was constantly shifting, especially in the ever-growing wealthy class. It was a time of rampant self-making, and Trump was the epitome of “self-made”. D’Antonio writes, “The notion that one could and should construct a self and then draw attention to it was hardly limited to the rich and famous. As the writer Tom Wolfe had made clear in a seminal New York magazine essay titled “The Me Decade”, Americans were generally enthralled by the prospect of “changing one’s personality--remaking, remodeling, elevating, and polishing one’s very self... and observing, studying, and doting on it. (Me!)” People from all walks of life were committing themselves to the kind of self-interest that permitted men to “shuck overripe wives and take on fresh ones” and encouraged women to resolve their unhappiness in affairs and threesomes. A key element in this, Wolfe noted, was to get others to pay attention to you as you accomplished your self-conscious transformation. (p. 148)” Trump is very good at getting people to pay attention to him. There is a charisma there, undeniably. And when Trump realized that people were paying attention, he used it to his advantage. Fortunately for Trump, the Me Decade was also overlapping with the Entertain Me Decade, a time when everything from television news to public education was adopting the premise that people will only listen to you if you have something interesting or entertaining to say. “Although Tom Wolfe wondered if the Me Decade represented a kind of spiritual crisis,” writes D’Antonio, “historian Christopher Lasch saw it as the mass psychological response of a society dominated by huge bureaucracies, saturated in images---advertising, TV programs, films---and subject to countless pseudo-events that were managed like theater productions. In his 1979 book, “The Culture of Narcissism”, Lasch described an America in which people accepted that one’s image, whether it was transmitted on television or in a family photo album, was a vital source of identity and power. (p. 149)” Spots on the popular TV show “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous”, interviews with Barbara Walters, cameos on "Saturday Night Live"---all of these pseudo-events were more than just good-natured “funnin’” with celebs; they were platforms to unveil Trump’s worldview. This was all part of the Trump Show, and the world was his audience: “Publicity came so naturally to Donald Trump, who grew up watching his father accept plaques and present bathing beauties to the eager press, that he was able to grab more than his almost without trying. (p.151)” When his marriage to Ivana failed, Trump wasn’t broken up about it. Or, if he was, he wasn’t about to show anybody that side of him. He already had a new and improved model waiting in the wings for him in Marla Maples. The fact that Ivana and Marla were real women, with real feelings, seemed to elude the general public and, for that matter, Trump himself. If Trump didn’t view his women as nothing more than trophies, it certainly didn’t seem that way to the rest of the world. The short-lived marriage to Maples was, for Trump, primarily a PR tool: divorce and adultery was a downer, but a new marriage was always exciting press. As Maples quickly learned, however, life with Trump was, as D’Antonio described it, a “concoction of crass and class (p.287)”. Eventually, of course, Trump dumped Maples for an even younger model, Melania. This history of discarding wives and working on the next, in many ways, paralleled the way he ran his business. Project followed project at a machine gun pace. Some panned out, some didn’t. Trump didn’t seem to be interested in creating anything of lasting value. He just wanted big, gaudy buildings with his name on them. One architect dubbed Trump’s collection of Manhattan buildings a “trail of tears”. “Trumpification” was a word, according to writer Elizabeth Kolbert, that in architectural circles came to mean “big, shiny and self-absorbed.” Architecture critic Carter Wiseman said, of Trump’s buildings: “I can’t think of anything that he’s done that has any lasting urban or esthetic value,” (p.304)” Narcissism alone, however, couldn’t sustain Trump’s celebrityhood. While he sounds like an 8-year-old schoolyard bully when he talks, hidden behind that orange face and those Jim Traficant hair plugs (he insists it’s his real hair) is an intelligence that is as difficult to believe as it is to ignore. That, and an overabundance of self-confidence. “Trump was willing to say and do almost anything to satisfy his craving for attention. But he also possessed a sixth sense that kept him from going too far. (p.331)” Perhaps this is why so many critics and fans alike didn’t take him too seriously when he announced his bid for nomination for Republican presidential candidate in early 2016. It didn’t make sense, really. Why would a guy who seemingly had everything want the presidency? Perhaps it’s because he didn’t have the presidency. It’s not a punchline, and Trump has proven that he’s no joke. Even his failures---Trump University, Trump steaks, birtherism, just to name a few---are still being talked about. Not necessarily in good ways. (Okay, maybe his steaks aren’t being talked about.) Oh, yeah, that birtherism thing: Trump loves taking credit for it, but, for the record, it was actually the brain-child of a lawyer/asshole named Andrew Martin in 2004. He admitted to making it up, by the way. Yeah, that thing that nearly 30% of really stupid Americans actually believe is true, twelve years after he started the rumor. It's bullshit. But Trump has yet to apologize for it, or even acknowledge that it's bullshit. That’s so Trump, though, according to D’Antonio. Here’s a guy who will never admit to doing or saying anything wrong, because to do so would be a sign of weakness. It also helps to explain Trump’s complete inability to talk about his past or reflect deeply on anything. It also may help explain some of his followers. They are basically the same as Trump, and Trump knows it: “What Trump understands is that anyone he might offend by, say, calling Obama “Psycho!” rejected him long ago, and those who like him draw nearer when he does this sort of thing. In a nation of 300 million people, a following as small as 20 percent is such an enormous market that he doesn’t need anyone else. (p.436)” D’Antonio’s examination of Trump and the world in which he inhabits is damning, indeed, but it’s not necessarily JUST a condemnation of Trump. It’s also an indictment of society itself: “But it is not Trump’s outrageousness that makes him worthy of interest. More important is that he has succeeded, like no one else, in converting celebrity into profit. (No matter how many billions he has, we are still talking about billions.) Somehow he has done this even as a substantial proportion of the population, arguably more than 50 percent, consider him a buffoon if not a menace. What does it say about Trump that he is so undeniably successful by the two measures that matter the most to him---money and fame? And what, pray tell, does it say about us? (p. 423)” ...more |
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not set
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Sep 06, 2016
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Sep 09, 2016
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Hardcover
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0316017426
| 9780316017428
| 0316017426
| 3.53
| 439
| Jan 01, 2007
| Jun 08, 2007
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liked it
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I’m stating upfront in this review that I am voting for Hillary in November. Clearly, if I had my druthers, I would prefer to be voting for Bernie San
I’m stating upfront in this review that I am voting for Hillary in November. Clearly, if I had my druthers, I would prefer to be voting for Bernie Sanders, but that’s obviously not going to happen. While I like some of the third party candidates, I will not vote a third party because voting for third parties, in this country, is throwing a vote away. It will also help only in increasing the chances of Donald Trump taking the presidency, and that can never happen. I could be like millions of others and state why I am NOT voting for Trump instead of why I AM voting for Hillary, but the reasons for not voting for Trump are, in my opinion, obvious. There are plenty of good reasons to vote FOR Hillary; however, they may not seem so obvious. The reason Hillary may not seem like an obvious candidate to many is due to several factors: outright sexism; a media that allows idiotic voices to be given equal measure to intelligent voices; and some admittedly bone-headed moves made by Hillary herself. In a fair, even-handed examination of the woman and the candidate, Jeff Gerth and Don Van Natta Jr.’s book “Her Way: The Hopes and Ambitions of Hillary Rodham Clinton” conclude that Hillary is a highly intelligent and powerful woman whose biggest obstacle in life is often herself. Published in 2007, “Her Way” only covers her life until her first attempt at running for president. Needless to say, it is missing the vital years as Secretary of State during the Obama Administration. There is, unfortunately, no mention of Benghazi or email scandals. Those missing years are of major importance, but they are unfortunately meant for another book. Gerth/Natta paint a pretty good picture of Hillary as a strong but seriously flawed candidate, one who probably shouldn’t have had to face a tough battle for Democratic nomination against a young, untested African-American Senator with a weird name but nevertheless did, which was extremely telling. Hillary is a complicated figure, to say the least. She has been viciously labelled “liar” by people who seem to forget that she works in a city full of people notorious for lying. She has faced angry mobs screaming for her imprisonment and/or public hanging for crimes that have never been adequately articulated. She (and her husband) have been plagued with scandal after scandal, most of which, to be fair, have been brought upon by themselves. Of course, even through all this, she manages to (as the saying goes) keep calm and carry on. This is, according to Gerth/Natta, due to a refusal on Hillary’s part to never show fear or weakness: “Through every tweak in her public image, through the dozens of physical and political makeovers, Hillary herself has been the meticulous architect of her persona. As a result, she is perhaps the most closely observed politician in America---and also the most enigmatic. (p. 7)” Hillary is the epitome of Sheryl Sandberg’s “Lean In” feminist philosophy: she is where she is due to the fact that she has probably had to work doubly hard to reach the same level as her male counterparts. She has had to fight for opportunities that were simply handed to some of her male counterparts. Unfortunately, women like Hillary face the sexist double standard that men who strive for power are ambitious go-getters while women who strive for power are cold, heartless bitches. And probably lesbians. The thick skin that Hillary has developed over the decades has, unfortunately, left her with a public image that is less-than-flattering. It has also left a very real impression that rather than own up to and apologize for mistakes, she has a tendency to blame others. Gerth/Natta write that “some of Hillary’s biggest mistakes began as rather inconsequential errors in judgment and exaggerations. When they were seized on by her critics, Hillary followed---and continues to follow---the same pattern: She dug in because she feared that admitting a mistake would arm her enemies and undermine her carefully cultivated image as an extremely bright person who yearns only to do good for her fellow citizens. (p.7)” It is ironic and upsetting that she and Trump share this trait. Whereas Trump’s motivation for not making apologies seems to be narcissism, Hillary’s motivation probably stems more from fear. Of course, Hillary is an extremely bright person, and she has a track record of doing good for her fellow citizens, but she has also made some huge mistakes and bad decisions in her life. Haven’t we all? Hillary hasn’t quite figured out that a simple “I’m sorry” goes a long way in ameliorating hurt feelings and those who feel wronged. It may have saved her plenty of hassles and nightmares regarding the scandals that have plagued her and her husband over the years, starting with the one involving a plot of land, a blank check, and a man named Jim McDougal. Much has been already been investigated, rehashed, and written about the Whitewater scandal, the Clintons’ bad decision to invest in a real estate deal that quickly lost money and a friendship between Jim McDougal---the brains behind the deal---and Jim’s wife, Susan. Needless to say, Whitewater tainted the Clintons for years afterward, long before Bill decided to run for president. Indeed, the vicious charges of “liar” hurled against Hillary aren’t new. They start as far back as 1996, when New York Times columnist William Safire called her a “congenital liar” in a column regarding Whitewater. In case you lived under a rock during the mid-‘90s, Whitewater was the name given to a 230-acre plot of undeveloped land in the Ozarks that were bought by the Clintons and the McDougals via the Whitewater Development Corporation in 1979, a corporation created by both couples specifically for the purchase of the land. At this time Bill was Arkansas Attorney General. Hillary was working as an associate at the Rose Law Firm. The goal was to supplement their income by selling off lots for development of summer homes. Unfortunately, the lots never sold, partly due to the economy and partly due to Jim McDougal’s mishandling of money. McDougal bought a bank in 1980, renaming it Madison Guaranty Savings & Loan. He hired Hillary as the bank’s attorney. State investigators pegged McDougal as an incompetent banker at best, a scam artist at worst. Due to their connections, the Clintons were roped into the investigation. While the Clintons lost money on the deal, it was nowhere near as much lost by the McDougals. Safire’s column described what he saw as a major discrepancy between Hillary’s law firm billing records for Madison Guaranty and her assertions that the work she did for the Arkansas savings and loan was minimal at best. He also believed that she didn’t come clean about her commodities trades. In July 1995, the Independent Counsel investigating the Whitewater issue interviewed Hillary under oath. Interviewer Hickman Ewing Jr. had interviewed a small group of staffers and came to the conclusion that “Hillary had lied, but wasn’t sure whether it was to protect her billing irregularities or to hide criminal conduct. (p. 164)” There were some discrepancies in the records, as the Clintons’ legal defense team found after its own investigation of the billing records. As Gerth/Natta explain, “while thy publicly maintained that the billing records exonerated Hillary, demonstrating she had done nothing wrong, privately some members of her legal team reached a more nuanced view: the bills did demonstrate small-time padding, but it was a practice knowingly tolerated by McDougal, the man who hired Hillary. (p. 165)” Hillary could have easily admitted that she either “cooked the books”, which would have been a crime, or that she simply didn’t do the work for which she was billed, which would have made her look incompetent. She chose to not admit anything, so the question still lingers today. That Hillary lied about her part in Whitewater is probably not in dispute. It’s whether she lied to hide wrong-doing or to protect her reputation that has been the issue. Sadly, despite the fact that she has never been indicted on any charges, this is a theme that would pop up several times in her life. Bill and Hillary, the couple, have, from the beginning, always been more than the sum of their parts. They were the Clintons, a force to be reckoned with, ever since they caught each other’s eyes across the room in the Yale Library. Many people close to the Clintons knew about the “twenty-year project”, a plan that involved Bill’s becoming governor of Arkansas and eventually eight years as president of the U.S. It also entailed Hillary’s eventual rise within the political sphere and her goal of becoming president for another eight years. It is remarkable that the plan has succeeded this far, but, then, Hillary is a remarkable woman. Even her opponents can’t dispute that. Hillary was one of 29 female graduates out of a class of 178 at Yale Law School in 1973. At that time, women only made up roughly 7 percent of law school graduates nationwide. The percentage of practicing lawyers who were women at that time was only around 3 percent. (p. 77) That Hillary is a feminist success story is a given. Feminists come in many shapes and sizes, however, and while Hillary’s success has paved the way for other women within the legal profession, she is arguably not “radical” or “militant” about it, despite what Rush Limbaugh or his fellow misogynistic conservative pundits might say. The other side of Hillary is the fact that she is also a loving wife and mother, a fact that often gets lost in this public perception of her as “frigid” or compassionless. Having Bill as a husband can’t be easy. His reputation as a philanderer and an adulterer followed him like a wet piece of toilet paper stuck on his shoe from before his Arkansas governorship. Many women would have dumped his ass years ago for the shit he pulled, and, indeed, many women have criticized Hillary for staying with him. It’s easy to pass judgment on her, saying that she stuck with him only for political reasons, for the residual sense of power as the First Lady. It’s easy to imagine that she was a “cold fish” in the bedroom, which is the reason Bill strayed in the first place. But all of this is unfair and cruel speculation. The truth is, Hillary and Bill have stuck together, and they have a beautiful and intelligent daughter as a result. No relationship is perfect, and the Clintons would certainly never admit to having a perfect one, but it’s rare when two people find each other, and it’s even rarer when the two people can positively feed on each other as symbiotically as Bill and Hillary have. When Bill became President in 1992, it was clear from the start that Hillary would not be a “traditional” First Lady. President Clinton created the President’s Task Force on National Health Care Reform five days after his inauguration. It would be chaired by Hillary. The goal was to confront and implement solutions to fix the crisis facing health care, a crisis that included the fact that 37 million Americans did not have health insurance, nor could they afford insurance given the rising costs of insurance. According to one initial poll, 64 percent supported Hillary’s appointment, 26 percent did not. There was a hierarchy within the Clinton White House, and anyone joining the Clinton team was told immediately about the hierarchy, as explained by Chief of Staff Thomas “Mack” McLarty. He explained that, at the top was a box which included “the President, the Vice President and the First Lady. All three of them sign off on big decisions. You’ll just have to get used to it. (p. 123)” This hierarchy, by the way, did not sit well with the Vice-President. Hillary and Veep Al Gore historically did not have a good relationship from the get-go. Hillary felt that Gore had too much influence on her husband, while Gore felt that Hillary was too involved in the president’s decision-making process. Still, the hierarchy worked, and Hillary assumed roles that previous First Ladies never would have thought possible. The 20-year program was going strong, but it didn’t take long for scandals to strike again to try and derail it. Many of the Clintons’ friends that had worked with them in Arkansas followed them to Washington. Vincent Foster, a friend and co-worker of Hillary’s during her tenure at the Rose Law Firm, became the Deputy White House Counsel, a high-stress job that Foster---who suffered from depression and anxiety---soon found to be overwhelming. On July 20, 1992, Foster’s body was found in Fort Marcy Park. A gun was found in his hand, which had gunshot residue, indicating that he had fired the gun. Foster’s death was ruled a clear-cut suicide by two separate investigative teams. Despite that, conspiracy theories still lingered---some that implicated Hillary as the actual murderer. As Gerth/Natta write, “The attacks against Hillary were extremely personal. Some of them had a basis in policy and politics, but others went well below the belt. Hillary initially accepted such assaults as part of the territory, but there was no precedent for them, both because the relatively new phenomenon of twenty-four-hour cable news created a new arena for mudslinging and because there had never been someone like Hillary in the White House before. (p. 131)” Dick Morris was Bill Clinton’s secret weapon. A political strategist, Morris was to the Clinton Administration what Karl Rove was to the Bush Administration. He was a significant member of Clinton’s inner circle until later getting the boot for a scandal involving a prostitute (one which, surprisingly, didn’t involve Bill). When a poll gauging the president’s popularity showed that roughly 30 percent viewed Clinton as “weak”, Morris audaciously told Clinton that “his weakness was Hillary. (p. 146)” Morris added, “Your strengths feed on each other. But people don’t get it. They think either she’s wearing the pants or you’re wearing the pants. (p.147)” By 1994, Hillary’s approval ratings had dropped from 56 percent to 44 percent within a year. It was a historically low rating for a First Lady: “Most Americans---62 percent in one poll---said they did not want Hillary involved in policymaking, though they approved of her performance as First Lady. This suggested strongly that a majority of Americans expected Hillary to stay within the boundaries of the traditional role of First Lady and not meddle in the official business of the country. That would not be possible---she was too smart, too strong, and too proud for that, and her husband trusted her judgment on most things---but some adaptation was, and Hillary found herself edged toward the sidelines. (p. 138)” In March 1995, Hillary began a five-country tour advocating for women’s rights around the globe. In what amounts to a horrible example of cosmic irony, while Hillary was touring the world speaking about female empowerment and bringing oppressed women out from under the tyranny of men, her husband was receiving 20-minute blow jobs from an intern that was his daughter’s age. The polls were right about Bill being weak, but Morris was dead-wrong about his weakness. Bill’s weakness was his penis. In 1998, Clinton confessed to the American people (after privately confessing to Hillary) that he did, indeed, have an “inappropriate relationship” with Monica Lewinsky. He added that it was “wrong”, and he apologized. If Bill had ended his statement there, things may have been different, and the world may have had a better view of him. Unfortunately, Bill had to get in an underhanded attack against Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr. Bill blamed Starr for disrupting the government and the eyes of the world for a tawdry investigation. For the most part, it seemed that Hillary was in agreement with her husband. Never mind that Bill did, actually, commit perjury. Never mind that Bill did actually stick his dick in the mouth of a girl twenty years younger than him. No, this was all Starr’s fault and the Right-wing conspiracy against the Clintons. Sadly, this was in keeping with the Clintons’ reactions to messes that they often created for themselves. The Clintons had a tendency toward knee-jerk response to media attacks: “Their conviction that the press assumed the worst led them in some cases to hunker down and not put out all the facts. (p. 123)” As First Lady, as Senator, as Secretary of State, and now as presidential candidate, Hillary hasn’t changed her m.o.: “When good things happened, they happened because of Bill and Hillary. When bad things happened, Hillary often found the fault in others. (p. 141)” In 2000 Hillary ran and won a Senate seat for New York. Hillary quickly gained a reputation for having what one Senate ethics expert called a “we can do what we need to” attitude. (p.225) Not filing required forms, only filing some forms, or filing forms extremely belatedly became a norm for her: “Her failure to file reports... demonstrates something that has long complicated the political and professional careers of Hillary Clinton: an underlying sense that the rules of the game are up to her. (p. 225)” With only a year as Senator under her belt, Sept. 11, 2001 happened. The attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were, according to her, an “attack on America” and required swift punishment for the terrorists who coordinated them. She was definitely more hawkish than many of her fellow Democrats, echoing the Bush Administration’s view that countries harboring terrorists would be viewed as enemies. Prior to 9/11, Hillary was vocal about her negative views about the Bush Administration and the efforts of the new presidency to undermine and destroy the policies that her husband had set in place, as well as well-established policies and protections that had been built up for decades to protect the middle class, women, and the environment. But then 9/11 had happened, and she stood by her president. At least, at first. Hillary has never commented on whether she actually read the National Intelligence Estimate, the ninety-page classified report on the U.S. intelligence community’s judgment about Iraq’s WMD given to the Senate ten days before the vote to go to war. Gerth/Natta write, “The question of whether Hillary took the time to read the NIE is critically important. Unlike the abridged and sanitized summary, the longer, classified version of the Intelligence estimate contained numerous caveats and dissents on Iraq’s weapons and capabilities, making it sound less certain that the country posed a legitimate threat to the United States. (p.244)” Hillary voted for war. In her explanation for voting for it, she said that it was due to the evidence of ties between Iraq and Al Qaeda. Had she actually read the NIE, she would have learned that “[i]n fact, the classified reports concluded that not only was Iraq not allied with Al Qaeda, but that Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden were rivals who harbored feelings of deep mistrust and enmity toward each other. (p.246)” For years, journalists have tried to get Hillary to admit her mistake in the 2002 vote to go to war with Iraq. To this day, she has never admitted that it was a mistake. The closest she has ever come is to say that her vote “turned out be a terrible decision for everyone” and that “those of us in the Congress” made “a lot of mistakes.” (p.303)” Not exactly a mea culpa. ...more |
Notes are private!
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Sep 08, 2016
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Sep 16, 2016
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Sep 08, 2016
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Hardcover
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1250105285
| 9781250105288
| 1250105285
| 3.54
| 784
| Sep 22, 2015
| May 31, 2016
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really liked it
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8/10/2024 addendum: Originally published as "Never Enough: Donald Trump and the Pursuit of Success", Michael D'Antonio's "The Truth About Trump" is st
8/10/2024 addendum: Originally published as "Never Enough: Donald Trump and the Pursuit of Success", Michael D'Antonio's "The Truth About Trump" is still one of the better in-depth Trump biographies. This is a pretty damn long review, but I felt that there was a lot that needed to be said. Granted, D'Antonio said it much more eloquently than I could... Donald Trump supporters love the idea that they support Trump because he “says things that most people are afraid to say”, which, on the face of it, sounds great as a testament to his blunt, brutally honest lack of political correctness but, in reality, tends to point out the fact that, if true, then “most people” are walking around with extremely racist, misogynistic, and xenophobic thoughts that they know are unhealthy or wrong, otherwise they wouldn’t be afraid to voice them. This is NOT something for which Trump should be commended. Actually, there is very little for which Trump should be commended, as he stands among a very small but powerful group known as “celebutards” (a term that my cousin probably didn’t invent but I’m going to give her the credit anyway) that includes the Kardashians, the Desperate Housewives (all of them), anyone who has starred on “The Bachelor” or “The Bachelorette”, those guys on “Duck Dynasty”, and Ryan Seacrest. These are basically people with no innate talent or any real reason to live but have somehow managed to gain fame and fortune way beyond their just deserts. Journalist and author Michael D’Antonio had the privilege (a term used loosely here) to interview Trump for a book about him. He managed to rope about ten good interviews before Trump, in (as D’Antonio called it) “mean girl style”, stopped the interviews and threatened to sue him for libel. For a book he hadn’t written yet. This is, according to D’Antonio, pretty normal behavior for Trump. Originally titled “Never Enough: Donald Trump and the Pursuit of Success” and published last year, “The Truth About Trump” is less of a biography than it is a case study of an incredibly dangerous---albeit somewhat charming---asshole. D’Antonio, who has won a Pulitzer Prize for journalism and has published 16 books, has too much class to call Trump an “asshole”. He’s actually pretty nice to the guy, actually going so far as to call Trump a real estate developer, as if that’s actually what Trump does. To be fair, even D’Antonio hints, more than a few times, that Trump’s real (and only) talent is shameless self-promotion. He gets it naturally, apparently, being the son of Fred Trump, a man who was notorious for extremely unethical business practices that made him a shitload of money and screwed over a lot of people, all carefully calculated within the bounds of legality. Trump is, according to D’Antonio, a product of the wealthy Baby Boom generation who grew up not really wanting for anything. Tough, individualistic, and arrogant, Trump was born to be Trump. He managed to come into his own during a very volatile time in American history: Vietnam, the Civil Rights movement, feminism, Watergate. He grew up watching the “Leave it to Beaver” innocence of the 1950s devolve into a mistrustful and conspiracy-rich world that was the late-‘60s and early-‘70s. It was a transition period in which “[f]ully 70 percent of those polled in the early 1960s said they had faith in their political leaders. By the early 1980s only 25 percent expressed the same sentiment. (p. 125)” Trump took advantage of the tumultuous zeitgeist. For him, it was a new golden era of always striking while the iron is hot: “Although many felt unmoored by the events of the seventies, young Donald Trump would consider Watergate and the lies told to justify the Vietnam War evidence of the world as it was---dangerous, corrupt, and full of intrigue. An intensely competitive young man who believed he was superior to others, Trump accepted that people would seek advantages wherever they could find them. (p.125)” Trump took the words of fictional character Gordon Gekko (Wall Street, 1987)---”Greed, for lack of a better word, is good”---to heart. Greed was good to Trump. Greed was his mantra. Greed was his philosophy. It helped that one of Trump’s primary personality traits---narcissism---helped in alleviating any crises of conscience he might have experienced in his numerous business deals. Guilt was not something Trump has ever succumbed to. Guilt is a sign of weakness. The 1980s was a weird time of corporate and social corruption. Morality was constantly shifting, especially in the ever-growing wealthy class. It was a time of rampant self-making, and Trump was the epitome of “self-made”. D’Antonio writes, “The notion that one could and should construct a self and then draw attention to it was hardly limited to the rich and famous. As the writer Tom Wolfe had made clear in a seminal New York magazine essay titled “The Me Decade”, Americans were generally enthralled by the prospect of “changing one’s personality--remaking, remodeling, elevating, and polishing one’s very self... and observing, studying, and doting on it. (Me!)” People from all walks of life were committing themselves to the kind of self-interest that permitted men to “shuck overripe wives and take on fresh ones” and encouraged women to resolve their unhappiness in affairs and threesomes. A key element in this, Wolfe noted, was to get others to pay attention to you as you accomplished your self-conscious transformation. (p. 148)” Trump is very good at getting people to pay attention to him. There is a charisma there, undeniably. And when Trump realized that people were paying attention, he used it to his advantage. Fortunately for Trump, the Me Decade was also overlapping with the Entertain Me Decade, a time when everything from television news to public education was adopting the premise that people will only listen to you if you have something interesting or entertaining to say. “Although Tom Wolfe wondered if the Me Decade represented a kind of spiritual crisis,” writes D’Antonio, “historian Christopher Lasch saw it as the mass psychological response of a society dominated by huge bureaucracies, saturated in images---advertising, TV programs, films---and subject to countless pseudo-events that were managed like theater productions. In his 1979 book, “The Culture of Narcissism”, Lasch described an America in which people accepted that one’s image, whether it was transmitted on television or in a family photo album, was a vital source of identity and power. (p. 149)” Spots on the popular TV show “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous”, interviews with Barbara Walters, cameos on "Saturday Night Live"---all of these pseudo-events were more than just good-natured “funnin’” with celebs; they were platforms to unveil Trump’s worldview. This was all part of the Trump Show, and the world was his audience: “Publicity came so naturally to Donald Trump, who grew up watching his father accept plaques and present bathing beauties to the eager press, that he was able to grab more than his almost without trying. (p.151)” When his marriage to Ivana failed, Trump wasn’t broken up about it. Or, if he was, he wasn’t about to show anybody that side of him. He already had a new and improved model waiting in the wings for him in Marla Maples. The fact that Ivana and Marla were real women, with real feelings, seemed to elude the general public and, for that matter, Trump himself. If Trump didn’t view his women as nothing more than trophies, it certainly didn’t seem that way to the rest of the world. The short-lived marriage to Maples was, for Trump, primarily a PR tool: divorce and adultery was a downer, but a new marriage was always exciting press. As Maples quickly learned, however, life with Trump was, as D’Antonio described it, a “concoction of crass and class (p.287)”. Eventually, of course, Trump dumped Maples for an even younger model, Melania. This history of discarding wives and working on the next, in many ways, paralleled the way he ran his business. Project followed project at a machine gun pace. Some panned out, some didn’t. Trump didn’t seem to be interested in creating anything of lasting value. He just wanted big, gaudy buildings with his name on them. One architect dubbed Trump’s collection of Manhattan buildings a “trail of tears”. “Trumpification” was a word, according to writer Elizabeth Kolbert, that in architectural circles came to mean “big, shiny and self-absorbed.” Architecture critic Carter Wiseman said, of Trump’s buildings: “I can’t think of anything that he’s done that has any lasting urban or esthetic value,” (p.304)” Narcissism alone, however, couldn’t sustain Trump’s celebrityhood. While he sounds like an 8-year-old schoolyard bully when he talks, hidden behind that orange face and those Jim Traficant hair plugs (he insists it’s his real hair) is an intelligence that is as difficult to believe as it is to ignore. That, and an overabundance of self-confidence. “Trump was willing to say and do almost anything to satisfy his craving for attention. But he also possessed a sixth sense that kept him from going too far. (p.331)” Perhaps this is why so many critics and fans alike didn’t take him too seriously when he announced his bid for nomination for Republican presidential candidate in early 2016. It didn’t make sense, really. Why would a guy who seemingly had everything want the presidency? Perhaps it’s because he didn’t have the presidency. It’s not a punchline, and Trump has proven that he’s no joke. Even his failures---Trump University, Trump steaks, birtherism, just to name a few---are still being talked about. Not necessarily in good ways. (Okay, maybe his steaks aren’t being talked about.) Oh, yeah, that birtherism thing: Trump loves taking credit for it, but, for the record, it was actually the brain-child of a lawyer/asshole named Andrew Martin in 2004. He admitted to making it up, by the way. Yeah, that thing that nearly 30% of really stupid Americans actually believe is true, twelve years after he started the rumor. It's bullshit. But Trump has yet to apologize for it, or even acknowledge that it's bullshit. That’s so Trump, though, according to D’Antonio. Here’s a guy who will never admit to doing or saying anything wrong, because to do so would be a sign of weakness. It also helps to explain Trump’s complete inability to talk about his past or reflect deeply on anything. It also may help explain some of his followers. They are basically the same as Trump, and Trump knows it: “What Trump understands is that anyone he might offend by, say, calling Obama “Psycho!” rejected him long ago, and those who like him draw nearer when he does this sort of thing. In a nation of 300 million people, a following as small as 20 percent is such an enormous market that he doesn’t need anyone else. (p.436)” D’Antonio’s examination of Trump and the world in which he inhabits is damning, indeed, but it’s not necessarily JUST a condemnation of Trump. It’s also an indictment of society itself: “But it is not Trump’s outrageousness that makes him worthy of interest. More important is that he has succeeded, like no one else, in converting celebrity into profit. (No matter how many billions he has, we are still talking about billions.) Somehow he has done this even as a substantial proportion of the population, arguably more than 50 percent, consider him a buffoon if not a menace. What does it say about Trump that he is so undeniably successful by the two measures that matter the most to him---money and fame? And what, pray tell, does it say about us? (p. 423)” ...more |
Notes are private!
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Sep 05, 2016
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Sep 06, 2016
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Sep 05, 2016
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Paperback
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0525426787
| 9780525426783
| 0525426787
| 4.13
| 9,632
| May 10, 2016
| May 10, 2016
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really liked it
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Everybody who has ever taken a high school American history class (and stayed awake in it) is familiar with the name Benedict Arnold and why he’s famo
Everybody who has ever taken a high school American history class (and stayed awake in it) is familiar with the name Benedict Arnold and why he’s famous. In case you’re one of the ones who slept through that class, Arnold was NOT the inventor of the Eggs Benedict. He was a hero of the American Revolution who became a traitor by joining the British side. Other than that, most people don’t know or care who Arnold was. Thankfully, historian Nathaniel Philbrick cares. In his book “Valiant Ambition”, Philbrick highlights the roughly four years (1775 - 1779) in which Arnold went from hero to turncoat, an event which did not happen overnight. Philbrick’s tale humanizes Arnold in a way that no textbook ever can, and he reveals some not-so-wonderful things about the American government during its infancy stages that most textbooks have kept secret. Alternating between Arnold and General George Washington, Philbrick’s book tells a fascinating and exciting story of the early battles of the American Revolution. Indeed, the first half of the book is a war buff’s sweet dream, as Philbrick writes about the pivotal battles at Fort Ticonderoga, Lake Champlain, and Saratoga. Not being a war buff, I found the first half of the book merely interesting. It’s extremely well-written, to be sure, but descriptions of battles, numbers of casualties, wounded, captured, etc. aren’t my cup of tea. Thankfully, Philbrick---a decent writer as well as historian---intersperses enough human drama to make it readable for someone like me. The second half really came to life for me, as Philbrick focuses on Arnold’s gradual spiral into treason. Arnold, who was seriously injured in the leg from a bullet wound during the Battle of Saratoga (he had just recovered from a similar leg injury at the Battle of Quebec City a year before), was deemed unfit for service. At this point in Arnold’s military career, this was just fine. He had grown annoyed at the Continental Congress, which he felt was displaying the same kind of corruption and incompetency as the British government it was fighting against. Arnold was pissed that Congress had not promoted him within the Continental Army but had, instead, promoted five junior officers ahead of him. He felt, rightly, that his proud service was deserving of a promotion. He resigned from the Army, but Washington---sympathetic to Arnold’s unjust treatment by Congress---convinced Arnold to stay. He rejoined the Army and served under General Horatio Gates in New York. Arnold despised Gates, and the feeling was mutual. At the Battle of Bemis Heights, Arnold defied orders from Gates and pushed back against the British. The resulting battle left the British open to further attack, and they eventually surrendered. Arnold’s actions led to victory for the Continental Army, but Gates ignored Arnold’s part in it and ended up taking credit for the success anyway. This was the battle in which he received his serious wound. He accepted a position as military governor of Philadelphia in 1778 and settled down to a somewhat quieter existence in the City of Brotherly Love. It’s also where he began to entertain thoughts of treason. Arnold met and fell in love with Peggy Shippen, a rich girl whose father had Loyalist sympathies. Hurting for money, Arnold considered the kind of financial reward he might receive from the British for vital information and service. That, and the respect that he felt he deserved and wasn’t getting from the Continental Congress. Peggy was also feeding him not-so-subtle encouragements to become a turncoat, as she felt that her wealthy family would have much more success in Britain than in Philadelphia. All of this eventually came to a head when, in 1779, Arnold held secret negotiations with British military leaders to give up Fort West Point, New York to the British in exchange for a large sum of money and an eventual position in the British military. Philbrick’s telling of Arnold’s treachery, the unsuccessful British takeover of West Point, and Arnold’s last-minute escape to the safety of the British is as suspenseful as any novel and is just begging to be turned into a movie. “Valiant Ambition” is a great book about the American Revolution, but it’s also an eye-opening look at an American life that is given short shrift in textbooks and history lessons. Arnold may be a hated figure in American history, but he was still a fascinating flawed human being with a valuable story to tell. ...more |
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Jan 10, 2017
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1682450171
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| 1682450171
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liked it
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“We should be embarrassed that we are not investing in our infrastructure, that we are not breaking up these large financial institutions, that we’re
“We should be embarrassed that we are not investing in our infrastructure, that we are not breaking up these large financial institutions, that we’re not putting a cap on interest rates... that we are the only country in the world that does not have health care for all of their people in major countries. We should be embarassed.” ---Bernie Sanders, during his now-famous Dec. 10, 2010 filibuster (p.148) “I don’t believe government should take over the grocery store down the street or own the means of production, but I do believe that the middle class and the working families who produce the wealth of America deserve a decent standard of living and that their incomes should go up, not down.” ---Sanders, during a speech at Georgetown University, Nov. 19, 2015 (p.173) I was sold on Bernie Sanders long before I read Harry Jaffe’s “Why Bernie Sanders Matters”, and I doubt reading the book would have been the tipping point either way for me if I wasn’t. Jaffe’s slim biographical sketch of the potential Democratic nominee for President isn’t that revealing or enlightening. It reads more like an extended piece that Jaffe wrote for Harper’s or Esquire. Still, it’s entertaining and informative enough. Sanders wanted no part in the book’s publication. Jaffe mentions several times throughout the book how Sanders refused to be interviewed, that the potential nominee thinks the idea of candidates writing books before being elected is pretty stupid. There is something endearing and, perhaps, even calculating about that viewpoint. Not that I think that Sanders’ disinterest in being interviewed for a book was intentionally calculating on his part, although it certainly unintentionally helps in further illustrating Sanders as the iconoclastic outcast. The book is, if anything, a decent attempt at articulating who Sanders is, what his brand of politics is (hint: he is not, by definition, a socialist), and why a candidate like him is so incredibly important in this current political climate. Jaffe also points out how not only does mainstream media seriously downplay and, oftentimes, blatantly mock Sanders but, in some cases, the media completely ignores important points that Sanders makes. For example, Sanders’ well-articulated plan to deal with ISIS: it is so vastly different in its boldness and straightforward logic, which is perhaps why the other candidates ridiculed it and the media buried it. In this era of big-money bullies like Donald Trump, whose fascist vision should scare any rational-minded person, we need an underdog like Sanders; someone who is willing and able to be the voice for the millions who have had their voices stifled. That’s Why Bernie Sanders matters. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jan 06, 2016
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Jan 10, 2016
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Jan 06, 2016
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Paperback
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my rating |
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|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
4.36
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it was amazing
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Mar 17, 2025
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Mar 05, 2025
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4.09
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really liked it
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Apr 08, 2023
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Mar 13, 2023
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||||||
4.54
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it was amazing
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Dec 30, 2021
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May 11, 2021
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3.82
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it was amazing
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Jul 21, 2020
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Jul 20, 2020
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||||||
3.97
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it was amazing
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Apr 2020
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Mar 04, 2020
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||||||
3.96
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it was amazing
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Mar 17, 2020
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Mar 04, 2020
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||||||
4.03
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it was amazing
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Dec 25, 2018
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Dec 17, 2018
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||||||
3.99
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it was amazing
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Nov 17, 2018
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Nov 15, 2018
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||||||
3.74
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it was ok
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Aug 26, 2018
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Aug 28, 2018
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||||||
3.50
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liked it
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Oct 31, 2018
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Jul 29, 2018
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||||||
4.13
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it was amazing
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Mar 11, 2018
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Mar 06, 2018
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||||||
4.06
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really liked it
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Sep 22, 2017
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May 17, 2017
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||||||
3.05
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liked it
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Nov 27, 2016
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Dec 06, 2016
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||||||
3.93
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really liked it
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Oct 28, 2016
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Oct 24, 2016
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||||||
3.62
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liked it
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Sep 29, 2016
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Sep 20, 2016
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||||||
3.54
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really liked it
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Sep 06, 2016
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Sep 09, 2016
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||||||
3.53
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liked it
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Sep 16, 2016
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Sep 08, 2016
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||||||
3.54
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really liked it
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Sep 06, 2016
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Sep 05, 2016
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||||||
4.13
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really liked it
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Jan 11, 2017
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Mar 05, 2016
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||||||
3.85
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liked it
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Jan 10, 2016
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Jan 06, 2016
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