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1948226391
| 9781948226394
| B0BT91B76L
| 3.61
| 237
| unknown
| Oct 17, 2023
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it was amazing
| What makes a person the same person over time? Is it our consciousness, the what-it’s-like to be us? Is consciousness like a light that’s either on What makes a person the same person over time? Is it our consciousness, the what-it’s-like to be us? Is consciousness like a light that’s either on or off?-------------------------------------- What remains of a person once they’ve died? It depends on what we choose to keep.Amy Kurzweil is a long-time cartoonist for The New Yorker. If the name sounds a bit familiar, but you aren’t a reader of that magazine, it may be because her father is Ray Kurzweil. He is a genius of wide renown. He invented a way for computers to process text in almost any font, a major advance in making optical character recognition (OCR) a useful, and ubiquitous tool. He also developed early electronic instruments. As a teenager he wrote software that wrote music in the style of classical greats. No gray cells left behind there. He happened to be very interested in Artificial Intelligence (AI). It helps to have a specific project in mind when trying to develop new applications and ideas. Ray had one. His father, Fred, had died when he was a young man. Ray wanted to make an AI father, a Fred ChatBot, or Fredbot, to regain at least some of the time he had never had with his dad. [image] Amy Kurzweil - Image from NPR - shot by Melissa Leshnov Fred was a concert pianist and conductor in Vienna in the 1920s and 1930s. A wealthy American woman was so impressed with him that she told him that if he ever wanted to come to the USA, she would help. The Nazification of Austria made the need to leave urgent in 1938, so Fred fled with his wife, Hannah. (He had actually been Fritz in Austria, becoming Fred in the states.) He eventually found work, teaching music. Artificial: A Love Story is a physically hefty art book, a tale told in drawings and text. Amy traces in pictures her father’s effort to reconstruct as much of his father’s patterns as possible. To aid in the effort there was a storage facility with vast amounts of material from his life both in Austria and in America. She joins into the enterprise of transcribing much of the handwritten material, then reading it into recordings which are used to teach/train the AI software. It is a years-long process, which is fascinating in its own right. She also draws copies of many of the documents she finds for use in the book. [image] Ray Kurzweil with a portrait of his father - image from The NPR interview - Shot by Melisssa Leshnov But there is much more going on in this book than interesting, personalized tech. First, there is the element of historical preservation. I always understood my father’s desire to resurrect his father’s identity as being connected to two different kinds of trauma. One is the loss of his father at a young age in a common but tragic scenario, with heart disease. The other trauma is this loss of a whole culture. Jewish life in Vienna was incredibly vibrant. Literally overnight it was lost. The suddenness of that loss was profound, and it took me a while to appreciate that. My great-aunt Dorit, who died this past year at 98, said they were following all the arbitrary protocols of the Nazis to save all this documentation. Saving documentation is an inheritance in my family that is a response to that traumatic circumstance. - from the PW interviewKurzweil looks at three generations of creativity, (Fritz was a top-tier musician. His wife, Hannah, was an artist. Ray was also a musician, but mostly a tech genius. Amy is a cartoonist and a writer.) using Ray’s Fredbot project as the central pillar around which to organize an ongoing discussion of concepts. In doing so, she offers up not merely the work of the project, but her personal experiences, showing clear commonalities between herself and her never-met grandfather. This makes for a very satisfying read. Are the similarities across generations, this stream of creativity, the impact not just of DNA, but of lived experience? Nature or nurture, maybe the realization of potential brought to flower by the influence of environment whether external (living in a place that values what one has to offer) or internal (families nurturing favored traits)? [image] Image from the book - posted on The American Academy in Berlin site One could ask, “what makes us what are?” The book opens with a conversation about the meaning of life. But life is surely less determinative, less hard-edge defined than that. A better question might be what were the historical factors and personal choices that contributed to the evolution of who we have become? [image] Image from the book - it was posted in the NPR interview Existential questions abound, which makes this a brain-candy read of the first order. Kurzweil looks at issues around AI consciousness. Can artificial consciousness approach humanity without a body? What if we give an AI a body, with sensations? Ray thinks that we are mostly comprised of patterns. What if those patterns could be preserved, maybe popped into a new carrier. It definitely gets us into Battlestar Galactica territory. How would people be any different from Cylons then? Is there really a difference? Would that signal eternal life? Would we be gods to our creations? If we make an AI consciousness will it be to know, love, and serve us? The rest of that catechistic dictat adds that it is also to be happy with him in heaven forever. I am not so certain we want our AIs remaining with us throughout eternity. As with beloved pets, sometimes we need a break. Are we robots for God? Ray thinks such endless replication is possible, BTW. Kurzweil uses the image of Pinocchio throughout to illustrate questions of personhood, with wanting to live, then wanting to live forever. [image] Every Battlestar Cylon model explained - image from ScreenRant Persistence of self is a thread here. As noted in the introductory quotes, Kurzweil thinks about whether a person is the same person before and after going through some change. How much change is needed before it crosses some line? Am I the same person I was before I read this book? My skin and bones are older. But they are the same skin and bones. However, I have new thoughts in my head. Does having different thoughts change who I fundamentally am? Where does learning leave off and transition take over? Where does that self go when we die? Can it be reconstructed, if only as a simulacrum? How about experiences? Once experienced, where do those experiences go? These sorts of mental gymnastics are certainly not everyone’s cuppa, but I found this element extremely stimulating. Kurzweil remains grounded in her personal experience, feelings, and concerns. The book has intellectual and philosophical heft, and concerns itself with far-end technological concerns, but it remains, at heart, a very human story. As one might expect from an established cartoon artist who has generated more smiles than the Joker’s makeup artist, there are plenty of moments of levity here. Artificial is not a yuck-fest, but a serious story with some comic relief. It is a book that will make you laugh, smile, and feel for the people depicted in its pages. Amy Kurzweil has written a powerful, smart, thought-provoking family tale. There is nothing artificial about that. I used to wonder if I could wake up into a different self. For all I knew, it could have happened every morning. A new self would have a new set of memories.Review posted - 01/12/23 Publication date – 10/17/23 I received a hard copy of Artificial: A Love Story from Catapult in return for a fair review. [image] [image] [image] [image] [image] [image] This review is cross-posted on my site, Coot’s Reviews. Stop by and say Hi! =============================EXTRA STUFF Links to the author’s personal, FB, Instagram, and Twitter pages Profile – from Catapult AMY KURZWEIL is a New Yorker cartoonist and the author of Flying Couch: A Graphic Memoir. She was a 2021 Berlin Prize Fellow with the American Academy in Berlin, a 2019 Shearing Fellow with the Black Mountain Institute, and has received fellowships from MacDowell, Djerassi, and elsewhere.Interviews -----NPR - Using AI, cartoonist Amy Kurzweil connects with deceased grandfather in 'Artificial' by Chloe Veltman -----Publishers Weekly - Reincarnation: PW Talks with Amy Kurzweil by Cheryl Klein -----PC Magazine - How Ray Kurzweil and His Daughter Brought A Relative Back From The Dead By Emily Dreibelbis ——LitHub - Amy Kurzweil on the Open Questions of the Future by Christopher Hermelin Songs/Music -----The Jefferson Airplane - White Rabbit- referenced in Chapter 6 Items of Interest from the author -----Artificial: A Love Story promo vid -----The New Yorker - excerpt -----New Yorker - A List of Amy Kurzweil’s pieces for the magazine Items of Interest -----Ray Kurzweil on I’ve got a Secret -----A trailer for Transcendant Man, a documentary about Ray Kurzweil -----WeBlogTheWorld - Amy interviews Ray in a Fireside Chat at NASA – sound is poor. You will need to ramp up the volume to hear – video – 23:07 -----Wiki on Battlestar Galactica ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Jan 08, 2024
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Jan 11, 2024
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Hardcover
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1250276578
| 9781250276575
| 1250276578
| 4.31
| 340
| Jul 11, 2023
| Jul 11, 2023
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it was amazing
| On Sunday February 18, [1945] the lieutenant in charge of Navy press at the On Sunday February 18, [1945] the lieutenant in charge of Navy press at the-------------------------------------- …good intentions have rarely paved such a direct route to hell.Back in World War II there was a small bit of graffiti that appeared in many places across the world. It showed a nose, the fingers of two hands and eyes peeking over a wall, or a fence, along with the words “Kilroy was here.” It was meant to show that American soldiers had been in a particular place, and that they had been everywhere. If Dickey Chapelle had wanted to, she could have left her graffiti across the world as well, not just to show that she had been there, but that she had been the first woman, the first reporter, the first woman reporter who had done the job in many, many dangerous places. She slept in Bedouin tents in the Algerian desert, and in the foxholes she dug herself in the hills overlooking Beirut. She rode in picket boats between battleships off the coast of Iwo Jima and flew in a nuclear-armed jet stationed on an aircraft carrier in the Aegean sea. On New Year’s Eve 1958, she patrolled the Soviet border with the Turkish infantry. On New Year’s Day 1959, she photographed Fidel Castro’s army as they entered Havana. She jumped out of planes over America, the Dominican Republic, South Korea, Laos, and Vietnam. She heard bullets flying over her head in Asia, North America, Europe, and Africa, and knew that they all sounded the same.[image] Engraving of Kilroy on the National World War II Memorial in Washington D.C. - image and descriptive text from Wikipedia It is likely you have heard of Margaret Bourke-White, famed for her coverage of World War II. You may have heard of Marguerite Higgins, noted for reporting on the Korean War. It is very unlikely you have heard of the subject of this book. Go on Wikipedia, or most other places that aggregate such information, and look up World War II correspondents. Chapelle, whose full name was Georgette Louise Marie Meyer Chapelle, is unlikely to appear. Yet, she did seminal work covering diverse elements of the war, including battles on the front lines. She even trained as a paratrooper, so she could jump into battle zones with American military units, which she did. Lorissa Rinehart seeks to correct that oversight. [image] Lorissa Rinehart - Image from Macmillan She tracks Dickey from her brief stint as a student of aeronautical engineering at MIT. Soon after, she was a journalist in Florida, covering a tragic air show in Cuba. It was her first real reporting “at the front” of a deadly event. And the way ahead was set. When Hitler invaded Poland in 1939, she saw that war was coming with United States. Although Congress did not agree to declare war, it did ramp up production of airplanes and other war materials to support the effort against Nazism. [image] Dickey Chapelle - Image from Narratively, courtesy of Wisconsin Historical Society She learned that she would have to become a photographer if she wanted to cover the war. So she took photography classes. Among her teachers was the man she would marry, Anthony “Tony” Chapelle. Their relationship was never a natural. He was much older, controlling, with a temper, described by some as a consummate con man. He would be jealous of her successes, and seemingly always eager to undermine her confidence. But he was a very successful war photographer and taught her the skills that would enhance her natural eye, helping make her the great photojournalist she would become. [image] Dickey Chapelle photographs marines in 1955 - image From Wall Street Journal – from Wisconsin Historical Society Rinehart tracks not only Chapelle’s adventures on the front lines of many military conflicts, but the skirmishes in which she was forced to engage to gain permission to be there at all. Sexism, as one would expect, forms a major portion of those struggles, but some had to do with her being a journalist at all, regardless of her gender. There is a string of firsts next to her name in the history of journalism, and the word “female” does not appear in all of them. Sadly, she was the first female correspondent killed in Viet Nam. [image] Chapelle with Pilots - image from the Wisconsin Historical Society Dickey was tough as nails, enduring some of the same training as the GIs she was covering. In addition to her considerable coverage of World War II, she was on the front lines of the major hot spots in the Cold War. Not only embedded with marines, Chapelle spent considerable time with troops from Turkey, Castro’s rebels in Cuba, anti-Castro plotters in Florida, secret American forces in Laos, Laotian anti-communist fighters, Algerian revolutionaries, Hungarian rebels, and more. The list is substantial. She would keep diving in, wanting to get the immediate experience of the fighters, the civilians caught in the crossfire, the human impact of war. No Five o’clock Follies for Dickey. She was not interested in being a stenographer for brass talking points, seeing that approach as the enemy of truthful reporting. [image] Dickey Chapelle sits and drinks coffee with the FLN Scorpion Battalion Rebels in the Atlas Mountains in Algeria - image and descriptive text from the Wisconsin Historical Society – shot by Dickey Chapelle Chapelle was captured, imprisoned, and tortured in Hungary by Soviet forces. It gave her a particularly pointed perspective on the treatment of prisoners by Western militaries, and the greater implications of the USA not holding to the highest international standards. One of her greatest gifts was a respect for local cultures and particularly local fighters. She was quite aware of how hard they trained, how hard and far they pushed themselves, how much deprivation they willingly endured. Yet she encountered attitudes from American officers and leaders that regarded non-white fighters through a self-defeating racist lens. Chapelle tried to get the message across to those in command how wrong they were in their regard for the locals the USA was supposedly there to support. Despite occasionally breaking through the brain-truth barrier, that engagement proved a demoralizing, losing battle. [image] Iwo Jima Medical Facilities - image from the Wisconsin Historical Society – shot by Dickey Chapelle Another example of her analytical capability was fed by her time with a community in Laos, led by a cleric, possessed of superior tactical and political approaches. She tried to bring her knowledge of this to American military leaders. It was not a total failure. Although her ideas were not implemented to a meaningful extent, she was eventually brought in by the military to teach what she knew to new officers. Through much of her work, which included extensive coverage of the on-the-ground Marshall Plan in Europe, her marriage to Tony was seemingly in constant crisis. It was an ongoing war, with dustups aplenty, advances and retreats, damage incurred, but resulted, ultimately, in a separation of forces, which freed Chapelle to pursue her front-line compulsion unimpeded by contrary wishes. [image] Fidel Castro with cigar, and five other men - image from the Wisconsin Historical Society – shot by Dickey Chapelle Her employers were not always news outlets. She was employed by the Red Cross to document the need for blood in the war zone. She covered a hospital ship, and medical units on the battlefield. It was hoped that her coverage would give a boost to a national blood drive encouraging Americans to give blood for wounded soldiers. It was a huge success. She worked for the American Friends Service Committee covering military behavior in the Dominican Republic. Other non-profits paid for her to report from other parts of the world. And sundry magazines provided enough employment to keep her working almost constantly. [image] A woman in a headscarf crosses an improvised bridge in the vicinity of the village of Tamsweg, escaping from Hungary to Austria - image from the Wisconsin Historical Society – shot by Dickey Chapelle This is an amazing book about an amazing woman.The story of Dickey Chapelle reads like fiction. Even though we know this is a biography, and that what is on the page has already occurred, Rinehart makes the story sing. Her story-telling skill brings us into the scenes of conflict, sometimes terror, so we tremble or gird along with her subject. She taps into the adventure of Dickey’s life, as well as the peril. This is the life that Dickey had sought, and which would be her undoing. The book reads like a novel, fast, exciting, eye-opening, frustrating, enraging, sad, but ultimately satisfying. Dickey Chapelle’s was a life that was as rich with stumbling blocks as it was with jobs well done, but ultimately it was a life well lived, offering concrete benefits to those who were exposed to her work, and an inspiration for many who have followed in her bootsteps. I side with prisoners against guards, enlisted men against officers, weakness against power. Review posted - 10/6/23 Publication date – 7/11/23 I received a copy of First to the Front from St. Martin’s Press in return for a fair review. Thanks, folks. [image] [image] [image] [image] [image] [image] This review will soon be cross-posted on my site, Coot’s Reviews. Stop by and say Hi! =============================EXTRA STUFF Links to Lorissa Rinehart’s personal, FB, and Instagram pages Profile - from Women Also Know History Lorissa Rinehart writes about art, war, and their points of intersection.Interviews -----Writers Talking – Season 2 Episode 7 - Talking to Lorissa Rinehart - podcast – 50:30 -----Hidden History Podcast - A Conversation with Lorissa Rinehart with John Rodriguez - video – 40:18 – begin at 1:43 – there is a transcript on the side -----Cold War Conversations - Dickey Chapelle – Trailblazing Female Cold War Journalist - audio – 1:01:50 Items of Interest from the author -----The War Horse - excerpt -----Facebook reel - Rinehart on Dickey Chapelle showing incredible guts -----FB - The Top 10 Books She Read to Prepare -----The History Reader - Escaping Algeria - excerpt -----Narratively - The Parachuting Female Photojournalist Who Dove Into War Headfirst Item of Interest -----Milwaukee PBS - Behind the Pearl Earrings: The Story of Dickey Chapelle, Combat Photojournalist - video documentary- 56:05 -----Political Dictionary - Five o’clock Follies ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Sep 30, 2023
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Oct 03, 2023
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Hardcover
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1250792495
| 9781250792495
| 1250792495
| 3.61
| 3,195
| Feb 14, 2023
| Feb 14, 2023
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it was amazing
| The real Poe considered himself first and foremost a poet. The real Poe was best known in his lifetime as first a tremendously tough critic, secon The real Poe considered himself first and foremost a poet. The real Poe was best known in his lifetime as first a tremendously tough critic, second a poet, and third as the author of tales of mystery and horror. Our perception of Poe has reversed that order.-------------------------------------- “Poe was no saint, and he wasn’t always easy to be around,” novelist Matthew Pearl said. “He had difficulty with friendships. He could push people away who were genuinely fond of him and wanted to help him. He could be charming, courtly, witty, and gracious, but he also could be sensitive, petty, suspicious, jealous, and resentful. He wanted to be noticed and appreciated, but he had a difficult time with processing appreciation.”Edgar Allan Poe sure had plenty of challenges in his life. First came the death of both professional actor parents by the time he was three years old, then being raised in a home where the wife was eager to have him, but the husband resented his presence and overtly disliked him. His adult love life featured a string of romances that did not come to fruition, and others that left him mate-less after far too short a time. In addition, even the mother-figures in his life were short-lived. Is it any wonder that so much of his work centered on death, particularly the early demise of young women? But you probably knew that, or had an inkling. What you may not have known was that Poe was also a writer of comedies, of high-seas adventures, a balloon ride, pirates and treasure. [image] Mark Dawidziak - image from CityBeat In A Mystery of Mysteries, Mark Dawidziak takes on the unenviable task of ferreting out how exactly Edgar Allan Poe died. It is, in fact, a double-barreled mystery. What was the cause of Poe’s death, and what happened to him during those missing days before he was found “in great distress” on the streets of Baltimore, wearing ill-fitting clothes that were not his own? Why did he look so disheveled, his hair unkempt, his face unwashed, and his eyes “lusterless and vacant”? Pale and alternately described as both cold to the touch and burning up with fever, Poe in his delirium held conversations with what resident physician Moran said were “spectral and imaginary objects on the wall.” Sound like the description of a character in one of his stories? It also sounds like a mystery worthy of Poe’s master detective (and the model for so many super sleuths to follow), C. Auguste Dupin.How Poe came to die where and how he did is a long-standing mystery, well, the specifics of it, anyway. Theories abound, of course. There is little in the way of physical evidence. But the author works with what evidence there is and gives many of the extant theories a good going-over. Edgar Allan Poe died on October 7th, 1849. The doctor labeled his cause of death as “phrenitis” (inflammation of the brain) which was commonly used when the true cause of death was unknown. Because of these mysterious circumstances, and the persona of Poe, there is much speculation about the true manner of his death. There are over 26 published theories on his demise, so far. - from The Poe MuseumIt is clear that he was in poor health in his final days, that he frequently drank to excess, that he suffered greatly from the loss of his beloved, and that his body was failing. He had struggled with alcohol since he was in school, and the behavior that is attributed to him in his final days fits well with a liver failing because of alcoholism or liver disease of another sort. But that is not the only suspect. He rarely had extended spells in which he was not struggling to get by, so add to his health-challenges the ongoing stress of poverty, with a not infrequent scarcity of sufficient food. He was also afflicted with his share of the widespread diseases of his time. The specifics of where he was on this day or that strikes me as uninteresting, in the absence of concrete evidence of murder most foul, or interference by aliens or time travelers, And even were there such a dark undertaking underway, a bit of patience would have seen to that task unaided. [image] Young Poe - image from the Poe Museum I confess that while I have read a reasonable portion of the better-known Poe works, I have little exposure to his lesser-known works, (there are links to some of these in EXTRA STUFF) and little knowledge of his biography. I suspect that most folks reading this are either in a similar situation, or can empathize with those of us who are. This is a book, rich as it is with details of the great writer’s life, that welcomes the phrase “you may not have known.” It does not delve into literary analysis of Poe’s oeuvre, beyond the obvious links between his lived experience and the subjects he included in his writing. It follows his struggles from when he was an unloved orphan, then a difficult, if brilliant student. You may not have known that he was a hale, athletic specimen in his youth, and even well into adulthood. Or that the moustache which we always see in images of him was an addition that did not take place until late in his all-too-brief life. He is seen as the inventor of the modern mystery. You probably knew that. But you may not have known that even the Ur detective, Sherlock Holmes, was inspired by a character written by Poe, and is credited as such by Arthur Conan Doyle. You may not have known that Poe is seen as the inventor of criminal profiling by none other than the originator of the FBI’s profiling division. You may not have known that he made a national name for himself as a literary critic, a perceptive and harsh one, working for magazines. [image] Virginia - image from the Poe Museum Poe was not just a superstar of a writer, but a legend in his own mind, which made him a particularly high-maintenance employee, leaving him constantly struggling to keep body and soul together, constantly pleading for work and assistance. He perceived himself as an outsider, which he was, denied the material comforts and the social access granted his peers. Poe scholar Steve Medeiros puts it more vividly: “If you could look through the peephole and see who was knocking, and could see that it was Poe, you wouldn’t answer the door, because he would want something. As much of a genius as he is and as charming as he could be, he could also be a real pain in the ass.”Dawidziak does an outstanding job of detailing for us the trials and tribulations of Poe’s endless quest for for some sort of familial bliss, whether primarily familial or romantic. It seems clear that he spent his life trying to gain the support and affection of the family life that was denied him as a child. His loneliness was a lifelong condition, even though interrupted by periods of happiness. [image] Poe as you have probably not seen him - image from Poestories.com Poe married Virginia Liza Clemm when she was thirteen. (He had first met her when she was six) He was twenty-seven. But he called her “Sissy” and it is not known if their relationship was conjugal or exclusively familial. He referred to Virginia’s mother as “Muddy” and related to her as if she were his mother, as well as Virginia’s. Denied the comfort of an actual, warm, supportive domestic upbringing as a child, constructing one may have been his primary motivation for the marriage. You may not have known that Poe was hardly a dour figure. In fact he could be very charming, coming across as well bred, if not necessarily well-dressed. He displayed excellent licks at readings of his own materials, and had great appeal and success as a lecturer. Maybe having two actors for parents had something to do with that. Even athletic as a young man, despite his privations. [image] A more usual portrait – image from American Masters He published only fifty poems or so. Of the forms he worked in, this was the one he loved most. You may not have known that he tried his hand at the novel as well, but was advised not to quit his day job after finally managing one. Try a shorter form, he was told, and he managed that transition quite nicely, writing some of the most famous short stories in literary history. What killed Poe? Not gonna give anything away here, but really, what difference does it make? What is worth caring about here is the insight one can get into Poe’s work from Mark Dawidziak’s fascinating detailing of his life, his deep dive into a troubled, but ultimately artistically triumphant, life. If you were ever curious about Edgar Allan Poe, about what his life was like, about what drove him, you can check out A Mystery of Mysteries and redirect that gap in your knowledge into the bin marked Nevermore. "Most people think of Poe as a gloomy pessimist, but, in reality, he was the eternal optimist. No matter what life threw at Poe, he always was kind of like Mr. Micawber in David Copperfield, sure that something was going to turn up. He always believed that. He never gives up.” Review posted – March 10, 2023 Publication dates ----------Hardcover - February 14, 2023 ----------Trade paperback - April 9, 2024 I received an ARE of A Mystery of Mysteries from St Martin’s Press in return for a fair review. Thanks, folks, and thanks to NetGalley for facilitating. [image] [image] [image] [image] [image] [image] This review is cross-posted on my site, Coot’s Reviews. Stop by and say Hi! =============================EXTRA STUFF Links to the author’s personal and FB, pages Profile - from Dawidziak’s siteHe is also a professor, and frequent lecturer, and an actor, known for his portrayals of Mark Twain. A Mystery of Mysteries is his 25th book. Interview -----Publishers Weekly - How Did Poe Die?: PW Talks with Mark Dawidziak Items of Interest -----PBS – American Masters - Edgar Allan Poe: Buried Alive- there are many informative clips on this page. -----The Poe Museum ——The Poetry Foundation - Poems by Poe Item of Interest from the author -----Crimereads.com - excerpt Some lesser-read tales by Poe -----Poe Museum - Metzengerstein - Poe’s first published short story, in The Saturday Courier ----------The Duc de L’Omelette - published by The Saturday Courier on March 3, 1832 ----------Lionizing - a comedy -----The Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore - Bon Bon - a comedy ----------Hans Pfall - early sci-fi ----------How to Write a Blackwood Article - after the success of Ligea he returns to write a comedy -----Poe Stories - Berenice -----University of Virginia- A Tale of Jerusalem - a humorous piece about Roman soldiers attempting to play a joke on the Pharisee and Gizbarim of Jerusalem ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Feb 20, 2023
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Mar 07, 2023
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Mar 06, 2023
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Hardcover
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125027236X
| 9781250272362
| 125027236X
| 4.04
| 637
| unknown
| Feb 22, 2022
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really liked it
| …sensation is not simply a process of gathering information from the periphery and funnelling it to the brain, but that actually the brain can infl …sensation is not simply a process of gathering information from the periphery and funnelling it to the brain, but that actually the brain can influence the data being captured. This is referred to as bottom-up and top-down processing, respectively. But this two-way flow of information is not limited to sensation, or even our senses; it is a feature of how every tenet of our nervous system works.-------------------------------------- …when we listen, what we hear is the result of the process of making sense of these pressure waves all around us, ascribing meaning to these tremblings of molecules. It is an early warning system, an awareness of what lies in wait immediately beyond our bodies or outside our field of vision. It is also an effective mode of communication. As the authors of the textbook Auditory Neuroscience state, ‘Every time you talk to someone, you are effectively engaging in something that can only be described as telepathic activity, as you are effectively “beaming your thoughts into the other person’s head,” using as your medium a form of “invisible vibrations”.’We tend to think of our senses as pure forms of data gathering. Physical sense encounters external stimuli and transfers that information directly to the brain, where the info is incorporated. Seems simple and direct, no? It might be were it actually the case. But it is most certainly NOT the case. We know for a fact that people believe whatever they want to believe, regardless of extant reality. January 6, 2021 and your crazy, Fox-addicted uncle offer prime examples of that. But it is also the case that believing is, literally, seeing, on a much more immediate, personal, sensate level, extending far beyond the willful ignorance of political (and reportorial) bubble-think. [image] Dr. Guy Leschziner - image from his Goodreads profile Dr. Guy Leschziner, a consultant neurologist in the Departments of Neurology and Sleep Disorders Centre at Guy’s and St Thomas’ Hospitals (where he runs the Sleep Disorders Centre) and at several other London institutions, presenter of several series for BBC on the brain and sleep, reports on a collection of people with unusual sensate experiences. (Sadly, none look anything like the amazing sense-connections of the characters on the fabulous TV series Sense8), If you were expecting an entire book on synesthesia, (which you might, given the somewhat misleading book title) you might have to feel that elsewhere. Yes, there is a bit of that in here, but mostly the book explores the interactions between our senses and our brains, and even considers the nature of reality as it is, versus how we might perceive it. And if you thought the doctor would limit himself to our five senses, well, mostly, but not entirely. He does write a bit about other elements of our being that might be considered senses beyond the five. Generally, the book is about the doctor figuring out what is causing strange sensations for his patients. Case histories abound. Mark hears his personal noises (chewing, breathing, and other) at way too high a volume, while the sounds of the external world are muffled. A TV personality has lost his ability to hear bird songs above a certain pitch, then starts hearing loud sounds everywhere, and a musical playlist that holds no appeal. Abi can experience basic tastes, but not flavor, as she has never had a sense of smell. Leschziner riffs on the difference between the two, offering a very surprising (to me, anyway) conclusion about the latter. There is a wonderful section on how smell impacts a wide range of human activities, including, but not limited to, the obvious ones about the edibility of food, and repulsiveness of rot, but how we make many social decisions based on an unconscious (mostly) reactions to personal odors. It certainly manifests in language. This look at olfaction passes the smell test, does not at all stink to high heaven, or smell fishy, and if called by any other name, it would smell as sweet. It is not to be sniffed at, or do you smell a rat? A sommelier loses her sense of taste, making it a bit of a challenge to do her job. You will learn a lot about how flavor informs our lives, and how it is actually constructed. Miriam’ s feet always feel burning hot. No matches in shoes involved. Alison’s feel for temperature is reversed. Dawn experiences massive pain in her face hundreds of times a day. Paul feels no pain. You might think this is a good thing, with obvious benefits. But the downsides can really hurt. Synesthesia does put in an appearance. For James, sounds have taste and texture. Valerie sees color associated with sound. Sometimes colors do seem too loud, even to those of us with the usual sense experiences. Is this a case of synesthesia in language? ‘My favourite Tube station was Tottenham Court Road, because there’s so many lovely words in there. “Tottenham” produced the taste and texture of a sausage; “Court” was like an egg – a fried egg but not a runny fried egg: a lovely crispy fried egg. And “Road” was toast. So there you’ve got a pre-made breakfast. But further along the Central Line was one of the worst ones, that used to taste like an aerosol can – you know, the aftertaste you get from hairspray. That was Bond Street.’It is the associations our sensate experiences have with our past, with our emotions with our thought processes, that give them value far beyond the immediate physical information they provide, whether one is a Proustian character recalling a large chunk of his past prompted by dipping a madeleine in a cup of tea, or one is a less literary sort, recalling a moment from early parenthood, prompted by the particular scents in the baby products section of a store. not only is there an overlap between olfaction and emotion, but also olfaction and emotional memory. Those regions of the brain involved in olfaction and emotional processing also have a strong role in memory.Ranging beyond, Leschziner writes of a woman’s inability to construct internal visions, and of the phantom limb experience of many who have endured amputations. Our sense of ourselves in space gets a look as well, prompting you to wonder just what the criteria might be for defining what does and does not qualify a bodily experience to be called an actual sense. Leschziner has an engaging writing style and keeps the intel delivery at an accessible pop-science level, for the most part. On occasion, a bit too much technical jargon does find a way in, but just skip past when it does. There are occasional moments of humor, one actual LOL, for me, anyway. But this is not a significant feature of his writing. This book is brain candy of the first order (another synesthetic bit of language. Once you get a taste for the stuff, examples do start to stand out.) Not only does Leschziner point out the ways in which what we consider normal, or at least typical, human sensation works, he shows how some senses work through intermediaries, while others get a direct-to-brain, no-TSA-line channel from input to processing. That was news to me. He also offers a discussion about how our brains function as biological time delays, in a way, gathering information to create a picture in the now based on data gathering of conditions in the immediate past, as our brains and senses have far too little bandwidth or supercomputer speed to gather and process all the incoming information in real time. There is another fascinating consideration of the actual nature of reality. It makes The Matrix seem a lot less fantastical. ‘Perception is nothing more than a controlled hallucination.’ This is a commonly used sentence in the world of cognitive neuroscience. Essentially, our brains work as guessing machines, interpreting what is coming in through our senses in the context of our model of the world. What we perceive relates to our existing beliefs about the world, to how what the information our senses provide us interacts with our virtual-reality simulation of the universe.Very much worth a look or a listen, maybe a touch, if you read braille, The Man Who Tasted Words is a treat for your brain, and your senses, however they work. the brain is not simply an absorber of information. It is a prediction machine. Our perception of the world is based upon predictions of how we expect our world to be, a necessary shortcut to deal with those three flaws, of data capacity, inherent delay and ambiguity. Review posted – February 25, 2022 Publication date – February 22, 2022 I received an ARE of The Man Who Tasted Words from St. Martin’s Press in return for a fair review. Thanks, folks. It smelled and tasted great. [image] [image] [image] [image] This review will soon be cross-posted on my site, Coot’s Reviews =============================EXTRA STUFF Links to the author’s personal, Instagram, and Twitter pages Leschziner is a consultant neurologist in the Departments of Neurology and Sleep Disorders Centre at Guy’s and St Thomas’ Hospitals (where he runs the Sleep Disorders Centre) and at several other London institutions. He has presented several series for BBC on the brain and sleep. The Man Who Tasted Words is his third book, the second intended for general readers. Interviews -----The Observer - Guy Leschziner: ‘Reality is entirely a construct of our nervous system’ by Andrew Anthony -----Intelligence Squared - Exploring the Senses, with Guy Leschziner by Helen Czerski – audio – 47:59 Items of Interest from the author -----BBC Radio - Mysteries of Sleep - Three lectures,, about a half hour each -----BBC – The Compass - The Senses - audio – 26:29 -----The Daily Mail - The bizarre condition that keeps a choir singing Land of Hope and Glory inside Bill Oddie's head: New book reveals what happens when our senses go haywire... including a woman who smelled rotting flesh for years, and another who felt scalded by cold water- an extract -----Owltail - 17 Podcast Episodes Item of Interest -----WebMD – on Synesthesia ...more |
Notes are private!
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Feb 07, 2022
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Feb 22, 2022
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Hardcover
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B098PDDZW3
| 4.09
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| Sep 21, 2021
| Sep 21, 2021
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it was amazing
| Milley believed January 6 was a planned, coordinated, synchronized attack on the very heart of American democracy, designed to overthrow the govern Milley believed January 6 was a planned, coordinated, synchronized attack on the very heart of American democracy, designed to overthrow the government to prevent the constitutional certification of a legitimate election won by Joe Biden.-------------------------------------- Milley summarized and scribbled. “Big Threat: domestic terrorism.”The title, Peril, is drawn from President Joe Biden’s inaugural address, in which he says “We have much to do in this winter of peril…” It is the epigraph for the book. Winter is not coming. It is bloody well here, and has been here a lot longer than most folks realize. Woodward and his much younger partner, Bob Costa, national political reporter for the Washington Post, look over some of what we have endured, consider the peril we face today, and give us plenty to think about concerning what lies ahead. Biden’s speech addresses not only the threat to our democracy, but the threat to our safety from COVID variants, the cry for racial justice, and the threat to our planet from global warming. This book focuses on the threat to American democracy. [image] Bob Woodward and Robert Costa - image from CNN It rolls along on two parallel tracks. One is Trump’s attempt to illegally overturn the 2020 presidential election. The other is Joe Biden’s determination to preserve the soul of our nation, focusing on his campaign, and the first few months of his administration. The chapters alternate, more or less between Trump and Biden. “Was that from this book?” One peril to be faced in reading this book is that of fixing what one read, when, where, and by whom, given the firehose flood of books on the Trump era. I addressed that in my review of I Alone Can Fix It. If this is of interest you can click here for a look. [image] Trump’s mob assaults the Capitol on January 6, 2021 - image from Business Insider January 6, 2021 is a date which will live in infamy. That was the day on which American democracy was nearly bombed into surrender by a sneak attack on the citadel of our national values. That was the day on which a failed Trump-led coup could easily have made moot the election he had just lost, and rendered American elections, certainly presidential elections, meaningless. It was the coming out party for an American brand of fascism that has long been an undercurrent, and sometimes much more, in our political life as a nation, a dark but always-present element in our population that Trump had recruited and encouraged for years, even before he ran for office. It is clear that, to the extent that we will ever know all the details of the coup plot, it is likely to come from the Congressional January 6 Committee’s final report, in combination with unredacted testimony given to that committee, testimony given at what we hope will be very public trials of those in charge of the effort, and intrepid reporters. The authors count among that final group. While offering far from a complete portrait of the plot, they have given us an insider’s look at what people in the administration and the government beyond that faced on 1/6 (which I personally think should be called Desecration Day.) And what they had to deal with in the months leading up to it. [image] Milley speaking with Trump - image from DNYUZ It was Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley whose intercession with his Chinese counterpart talked the Chinese military down from a concern that Trump might launch an attack on China in order to remain in office, not once but twice. As the Chinese were again concerned what our imbalanced president might do after his coup attempt failed. There was also concern that Trump would attack Iran in an attempt to secure his own position. I doubt Israel would have appreciated the incomings such an action would have surely generated. He also floated the idea of evacuating troops from Afghanistan in January, 2021, with minimal planning. Thankfully he was dissuaded from that impulse as well. Milley is the official most in the limelight here. He was appointed to that post by Donald Trump. In Phil Rucker and Carol Leonnig’s book I Alone Can Fix It, Milley told them of his concerns about the dangers of a right-wing coup. There is plenty more of that in this book as well. We hear a lot from Trump-whisperer Lindsey Graham about his conversations with Trump, who appears to have actually convinced himself of the truth of his own lies. He is a fine representative of those who, while remaining loyal to Trump, try to counsel him to sane courses of action. [image] Donald Trump pretends to check his watch as Senator Lindsey Graham speaks at the White - image and text from The Guardian We get a look at the conversations among the cabinet level officials, unwilling to allow him to use the US military as his private army. We learn what analyses they shared about the dangers facing the nation, what agreements they came to among themselves, what steps they took, and what mistakes they made. We get a look at how these and other level-headed adults in the administration did whatever they could to keep Trump from causing irreparable harm to the nation with his impulsive-driven, self-serving, poorly-informed decision-making. Part of all this included making certain that proper chains of command would be followed should Trump decide to start a war as a Wag the Dog self-preservation move, or command the military to take actions that were illegal. Days after the election, Trump fired Secretary of Defense, Mark Esper, in large part for his public opposition to the use of the military to suppress BLM protests. It was certainly clear to those tracking Trump’s actions that Trump wanted the US military to be his personal security force, and Esper was an impediment. In fact, it was appropriate for the military to be brought to bear to battle an insurrection, and the delays in the military’s response can be traced to the Department of Defense, by then Esper-free, sitting on its hands for far too long. [image] Defense Secretary Mark Esper – fired after the election - image from Reuters via BBC One item that becomes clear from the telling here is that Mike Pence did his best to find a way to Yes for Trump, but was unable. It is also clear that Trump pushed Pence a step too far when he issued a press release claiming that the Vice President agreed with Trump’s lie that the VP had the legal right to refuse to accept the electoral votes of any state. It was the only thing, apparently, in four years in office, that generated a spine in the relentlessly invertebrate Pence, driving him into bunker mode. It is unfortunate that Pence will likely be remembered more for this single act than for his years of pathetic subservience to and enabling of an American Mussolini. It is chilling to consider that had there been alternate slates of electors ready to bring to bear, Pence might have actually done the deed. Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi called him repeatedly after the insurrection, wanting him to invoke the 25th amendment. He refused to take their calls, calling a quick halt to his vertebrate moment. [image] Mike Pence flees the mob on 1/6 - image from The Guardian The book will (it certainly should) make your blood boil. The Founders put together a guiding document and a set of rules that presumed they would be carried out by honorable officials. They did not count on the possibility of a sociopath being elected president. Someone with not only no respect, but outright contempt, for the rule of law. He really claimed, and maybe even believed in his diseased mind, like Louis XIV, who famously said “L’etat est moi,” that he, personally, was the state. Bottom line is that when you see Woodward and Costa being interviewed about this book, or talking about the events they covered, their hair is on fire. They understand what it was that happened, namely that not only did the nation narrowly avoid a fascist coup that would have made the USA a dictatorship, but that the party of the guy who ordered it is all lined up and ready to goose-step their way to another try. We may have survived Trump’s 2021 coup attempt, but it is clear that he will try again, and there are far too many who are more than willing to go along, whether actively or passively. [image] Trump with Steve Bannon - image from CNN Now, as for the other part of this book. It should come as a salve for the angst generated by the reporting on Trump. They follow Biden’s decision to run, following the Charlottesville “good people on both sides” outrage, convinced that the very soul of the nation was imperiled, and that he could offer a way out of this very dark cloud, more so than other extant or potential candidates. We get to see a very human Biden, sincere, knowledgeable, willing to listen to well-informed and well-meant advice, willing to make needed adjustments, willing to talk to anyone, anywhere, and unwilling to be baited by Trumpian taunts and lies. We are let in to some of the family troubles the Bidens have endured, that they continue to endure. Biden is shown as the anti-Trump, an incredibly decent person, gifted at making personal contact with people, caring about people, remembering them, willing to spend unheard of amounts of time with people who could offer him nothing but their shared pain. It shows candidate Biden behaving in a presidential manner when the actual president would not. It is a warm portrait of a man the authors have certainly seen enough of to know. They also show him getting tough in legislative negotiations, and showing his exasperation when sanity, and decency, seem insufficient to accomplish a goal. The book continues into March 2021, so shows Biden as president as well as merely a candidate. But, of course, being Washington reporters, they feel it necessary to take a swing or two. In one instance they report on Biden snapping at a reporter who was being particularly dickish as if there was something wrong with that. That Biden later apologized was the real fault here. The reporter merited being smacked down. Their portrayal was that this was a kind of gaffe. Take a moment to roll your eyes here. The Beltway media have particular story lines that they adhere to, regardless of the facts. Reporting Biden as particularly gaffe-ridden is among them. He is no more so than most other people. We all misstate things at times. But they seem eager, drooling even for a chance to catch another one and reinforce the image. Their treatment of Biden’s entirely appropriate reaction to a hostile reporter is of a cloth with that mindlessness. [image] Presidential candidate and former Vice President Joe Biden takes a picture with the Downs family after campaigning in Rehoboth Beach. - image and text from the Cape Gazette Gripes (in addition to the one above) As happens far too often in books of this sort, namely political history books put together largely through personal interviews, the authors sometimes slip into stenography mode. They report, presumably straight-faced, about Senate Majority, now Minority Leader Mitch McConnell trotting out his spin about tax cuts for the rich being “tax reform” and crediting Trump for an economy that had been humming along quite nicely when he took office. I call BS. They continue in this mode about McConnell working with cabinet members trying to push Trump to some semblance of normal. Take nothing McConnell reports himself saying at face value. Second-party confirmation is always needed there. Ditto for Lindsey Graham. Former Republican and Lincoln Project co-founder Steve Schmidt issued a statement about Graham…saying that many people have tried to understand Graham over the years. He encouraged people not to look at it "through the prism of the manifest inconsistencies that exist between things he used to believe and what he's doing now."Graham is quoted at length here, and it is all self-serving. Douse that with salt before consuming. Gripes, notwithstanding, Peril is an important book, another in a large library of reporting on the workings of the Trump administration, and particularly at how close Trump’s attempted coup came to succeeding. There are many lessons to be learned here. One is that the January 6th Committee should interview, whether via subpoena or not, all the players involved in orchestrating the insurrection, including Trump, and that they need to complete their report and make all necessary criminal referrals to the Department of Justice before Republicans have a chance to regain control of the House and shut them down. We learn that the norms and rules of American government are fatally flawed, allowing the dark-hearted to game the system for their political and personal advantage. We learn that even in dark times there are officials willing to put their careers, and even their lives on the line to stand up for the ideals and institutions, that Americans claim to admire and respect. We learn that there need to be fixes made to the Electoral Count Act of 1887 to make sure that each state’s electors truthfully represent the decision of the voters. [image] Attorney John Eastman, left, speaks next to Rudy Giuliani at Donald Trump’s rally on 6 January - Image and text from Reuters, by way of The Guardian – photo by Jim, Bourg The book’s epigraph cut short Biden’s inaugural statement. The full sentence reads We will press forward with speed and urgency, for we have much to do in this winter of peril and possibility. Despite the subsequent COVID variants that have killed or damaged so many in our nation, and the world, a major relief bill made it through a very marginally Democratic Congress. Other measures are needed, but hope that more can be done remains alive, despite Joe Manchin. There are hopeful signs in many parts of the nation that democracy is on the rise… [image] Hmmm, reviewus interruptus. Looks like we have run out of space here on Goodreads. Despair not, the full review, including EXTRA STUFF, is on my site, Coot’s Reviews. See you there. [image] [image] [image] [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
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Oct 05, 2021
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Dec 27, 2021
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Dec 27, 2021
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Kindle Edition
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1250273609
| 9781250273604
| 1250273609
| 3.21
| 822
| Sep 21, 2021
| Sep 21, 2021
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really liked it
| When I first learned that Raiders of the Lost Ark, my favorite movie, might have been based on an actual archaeological expedition, I felt like my fac When I first learned that Raiders of the Lost Ark, my favorite movie, might have been based on an actual archaeological expedition, I felt like my face was melting off. - from The Untold Story… articleBefore he was the Police Commissioner stuck having to deal with Jack the Ripper, (who was at first, BTW, called, much less memorably, “Leather Apron”) Captain Charles Warren, a Royal Engineer, spent parts of several years near Jerusalem doing archaeological work for the British Crown, digging out some ancient tunnels, and laying the groundwork for explorations to come. About thirty years later, a Finnish scholar believes he has found a code in the Book of Ezekiel that addresses some of the tunnels Warren had excavated. Dr. Valter Juvelius’s code-breaker, he says, points the way to the secret location of the Ark of the Covenant. [image] Brad Ricca - image from Amazon Of course, today this guy would be one of a thousand cranks flogging his wares on the internet, generating eye-rolls, and maybe trying for a spot on Shark Tank. But in 1909 he was taken seriously and was embraced by a group of men willing to spend some of their considerable excess cash on an adventure, and look to their wealthy friends and associates to provide the rest of the needed funding. They formed a group called J.M.P.V.F. Syndicate, for their initials, but referred to it as The Syndicate (nothing sinister there), hoping to find the Ark, reputed to have properties that allowed one to communicate directly with God. Whether it provided an early version of the iPhone, a Star Trek communicator, an eight-ball, a metal can with a very, very long string attached, or no comms-capacity at all, they estimated it to be worth hundreds of millions of pounds, or something on the order of twenty three billion dollars in today’s money. Adigging they will go. [image] Charles Warren in Palestine, 1867 - image from The History Reader We follow the progress of the digs over several years, noting the discoveries that were made, and the challenges the participants faced. Some very Indy-ish adventures are included. The point of this book is not to tease you about the location of the Ark. Ok, maybe it is, a bit, but rest assured that if the Ark had been found and the author had figured out where it is, I seriously doubt he would be telling us. He would be living VERY LARGE somewhere, and who knows, maybe having daily chats with you-know-who. (Sup, G?) True Raiders is my love letter to Raiders of the Lost Ark, but also to the conspiracy-minded genre of eighties properties like In Search Of, Amazing Stories, and Holy Blood, Holy Grail…I…want to ask real questions about the intersections between fact, story, and truth. Did Monty really go after the Ark? Yes, he did. What did he find? That answer is more complicated. - from The Untold Story… article [image] Monty Parker - image from Wiki If you picked up this book without having examined the flap copy or inspected the cover too closely, you could easily mistake it for a novel. Ricca has taken liberties, fleshing out the structure of known events with bountiful interpretation. It makes for a smoother and more engaging read than a mere recitation of facts might allow. I was reminded of the shows aired on The History Channel in which actors portray historical events. Ricca does it with panache. A sample: Ava Lowle Willing Astor was in a mood. She reclined back on her chair and paged through the Times to take her mind off things. She pushed through the headlines to the society pages, to look for the names of people she knew and parties she had attended—and those she had ruthlessly avoided. The Sunday-morning light was streaming through her high windows. Her daughter Alice was around, somewhere. [image] Ava Lowle Willing Astor - image from Wikipedia Ava and Monty flirt. But it seems she is here more for social context, and to offer a take on what challenges were faced by uber-rich women with more independence than was thought proper at the time. There are few women playing a significant role in this story. One is Bertha Vester, a Chicago-born local, brought to Jerusalem as a child. She became a towering figure in Jerusalem, internationally renowned for her charitable work with children of all faiths, through the organization her father had established, The American Colony. She was also a major source for Parker, connecting him to local experts able to help in the dig. And offering him the benefit of her knowledge of area history, including Charles Warren’s work. [image] Bertha Spafford, (later Vester) age 19, in 1896. - image from IsabellaAlden.com In the Notes that follows the text of the tale, Ricca says: Rather than a history, this is a history of the story. Chapters are grouped into parts that are based on the point-of-view of the person or source used.That is true enough. Monty Parker’s expedition was the one looking hard for the Ark, but Warren’s work thirty years before had done the initial digging, and the de-coding by Dr. Juvelius provided the actual spark. The stories merge when Parker is helped by Bertha Vester to connect with Warren’s work, and with local archaeological experts. [image] Valter Juvelius (left) around 1909–1911 in the Siloam tunnel. There are personalities aplenty on display here. Ricca gives us some individual histories, although nothing that might smack of a stand-alone biography. Some of the characters were involved in newspaper headlines or related notoriety. Ava Lowle Willing Astor was involved in a front-page divorce from John Jacob Astor IV, who would later sail on the maiden voyage of an ill-starred ship, prior to her involvement with the expedition. As noted earlier, Charles Warren had the misfortune of being the Police Commissioner when Jack the Ripper was cutting his way through London. Monty and his pals gained notoriety of an unwanted sort after one of their (certainly unauthorized) digs. Their hasty retreat was an international incident, garnering coverage in the New York Times, and generating mass outrage among the locals in Jerusalem. [image] NY Times headline about Parker absconding …on May 14, 1911, The New York Times ran a story titled “Mysterious Bags Taken from Mosque.” In it, the expedition is described as having worked for two years just “to reach that one spot.” And though the article asserts that “what they really found no one knows,” it notes that the expedition “told different persons that they are ‘very satisfied.’” The article claims that four or five men, including Parker, Duff, and Wilson, invaded the Haram at midnight, having gained entrance by bribery, and that they lifted up a heavy stone, entered a cavern, and “took away two bags.” Before they left on their white yacht from Jaffa, they had a cup of tea. The caretaker they had bribed was in jail and suffered a further indignation: his great beard and mustache had been shaved off in public.The book raises questions of where found relics belong, not, ultimately, showing Monty and his partners in the kindest light. Part of that portrayal is to show the self-regard of the upper crust, presuming that their privileged upbringing carried with it not just an inflated sense of entitlement, but an enhanced level of self-regard as being of strong, moral character. Juvelius was relieved. He knew that one would have to have mediocre intelligence to think they could milk secrets from an English gentleman.Another participant, Robin Duff, let on to Rudyard Kipling that he was responsible for raping local virgins in Jerusalem. Maybe not quite the highest moral character. [image] Father Louis-Hughes Vincent There is a far-too-lengthy where-are-they-now series of chapters at the back of the book that might have been more alluring in a longer work, one that had offered more beforehand about the people involved, made us more interested in their stories. It makes sense in the overall intent, but seemed too large a tail for a creature of this size. [image] (the unfortunately named) Warren’s Shaft - image from Wikimedia You will learn some interesting intel reading True Raiders, such as where the Indy writers got the notion of that gigantic boulder rolling through a tunnel, a possible origin for a Scandinavian deity, and how George Lucas decided on the Ark as the target of Indiana Jones’s first great quest. It seems possible that Monty Parker was one of many real-world models for the fictitious Indy. The location of the Ark should surely spark some interest of the did-they-or-didn’t-they find it sort. You will see the sort of competition Parker faced while attempting to find the Ark, from both the rich and powerful billionaire sorts and more local interests. Ava Astor has some interesting whoo-whoo experiences, unrelated to Monty’s dig. Ricca offers a sense of adventure in a real-world story, however embellished the details might be. He brings actual archaeological knowledge along, showing the significance of the finds made by both the Warren and Parker digs, gives us a look at some of the social mores and activities of the times, and loads it all up with a wonderful sense of fun, allowing readers to wonder, Would I have done this or that if offered the chance? No fedora, leather jacket, or whip needed. True Raiders is definitely worth exploring. No snakes involved. [image] Fake, but fabulous Raider - image from Mental Floss Review first posted – September 21, 2021 Publication dates ----------Hardcover - September 24, 2021 ----------Trade paperback - December 13, 2022 I received an e-ARE of True Raiders from St. Martins through NetGalley in return for doing some digging. Thanks, folks. This review has been cross-posted on my site, Coot’s Reviews. Come say Hi! [image] [image] [image] =============================EXTRA STUFF Links to the author’s personal, FB, and Twitter pages Interview -----Constant Wonder - Searching for the Ark of the Covenant - by Markus Smith - audio – 40:34 Items of Interest from the author -----Excerpt from The History Reader - True Raiders: Charles Warren -----The Untold Story of the Expedition to Find the Legendary Ark of the Covenant I try not to think about it too much, but I think I spent a great many lonely years earning a doctorate solely because of Raiders. I may not have been lost in Egyptian tombs or navigated ancient mazes, but I have found lost documents and have taught for many years out of cramped offices that resembled utility closets. And it was all great. But I never thought it would lead me to the Ark. Somewhere, I was disappointed not only that it hadn’t, but that I had foolishly believed it would.Items of Interest (Wikions?) -----Wiki on Charles Warren -----Wiki on Monty Parker -----Wiki on Cyril Foley -----Wiki on Book of Ezekial ----- Library of Congress - The Bertha Vester diaries -----World History Encyclopedia - The Moabite Stone [Mesha Stele] by William Brown ----- Wiki on Ava Lowle Willing Astor by Mark Meredith ...more |
Notes are private!
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not set
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Sep 18, 2021
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Sep 18, 2021
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Hardcover
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1250247136
| 9781250247131
| 1250247136
| 4.06
| 3,164
| Apr 20, 2021
| Apr 20, 2021
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really liked it
| Daniel Boone had always despised, and would for the rest of his life, his outsize reputation as an Indian fighter. He maintained that dealing with Daniel Boone had always despised, and would for the rest of his life, his outsize reputation as an Indian fighter. He maintained that dealing with belligerent Native Americans, whether via combat or negotiation, was for the most part a matter of luck and instinct. His rescue by Simon Kenton was evidence of the former, his quick thinking on the Licking River, the latter. He was vastly more proud of his ability to endure the burdens of a huntsman’s life with a seemingly preternatural stoicism. Now, it was as if the patience he had honed over a lifetime of stalking game through the deep woods was in anticipation of this moment. He would need that gift in the coming months.When I was a kid, one of my favorite possessions was a bona fide, official Davy Crockett coonskin cap. No actual raccoons suffered to create that bit of headgear. Disney had made several live-action films in the 1950s (TV mini-series’ really) celebrating Davey Crockett, King of the Wild Frontier. Crockett may have actually worn one that wild creatures suffered to provide. Daniel Boone preferred beaver hats. Although Crockett and Boone were born a half-century apart their deaths were separated by a mere sixteen years. But to young TV viewers in the 1950s the two seemed inseparable, played on the screen by the same actor, Fess Parker, wearing pretty much the same costumes, no doubt saving Disney some wardrobe expenses. [image] Fess Parker - image from the California Wine Club The memories I retain of the shows are much-faded, but I doubt much has been lost. Civilized American good guy frontiersmen (Crockett) or pioneer (Boone) doing battle with hostile indigenous residents, and battling corruption among his own people. Standard TV fodder of the 1950s and early 1960s, with the usual doses of humble wisdom, and little mention made of the genocide that was being foisted on sundry North American native peoples. [image] Bob Drury - image from Macmillan It was the chance to fill that cavernous memory hole with some actual information, on at least one of Fess Parker’s greatest roles, that drew me to Blood and Treasure. On finishing the book, it was possible to drop a coin into that chasm and hear it hit bottom, after a reasonable wait, much better than hearing nothing prior. [image] Tom Clavin - image from The Southampton Press There is history and there is Boone. It is the information on both that is of great value here. Those of my generation at least know the name Daniel Boone, even if our image of him may have been the product of Disneyfication. I expect there are many, born later, to whom the name Boone is likelier to summon images of a baseball figure, a town or city by that name, or a brand of sickly alcoholic beverage. He was a fascinating real-world character, whatever hat he chose to wear. The authors report in the C-Span interview that, unlike Parker’s cinema-friendly 6’5”, Daniel Boone was actually 5’7” or 5’8,” a typical height for a man of his times. He had several cousins, however who were over six feet and Boone was concerned that a raccoon skin cap would make him look even smaller. He favored a felt hunter’s hat that was made of beaver. [image] A child’s “Davy Crockett” hat – image from the Smithsonian The character himself is fascinating, presenting both as a man of his era, and a person with some 21st century sensibilities. Daniel Boone was born in what is now Berks County, Pennsylvania, in 1734, the 6th of eleven children, to Quaker immigrants from England and Wales. The family ran afoul of local public opinion when one of their children married outside the religion, while visibly pregnant. When another, Boone’s brother, Israel, also married outside the faith, and dad stood by him, Pop was excommunicated. Daniel stayed away from the church after that. Three years later the family moved to North Carolina. While Boone carried a bible with him on his long hunts, considered himself a Christian and had all his children baptized, he was not exactly a bible thumper. He was open to other ways of viewing the world. This willingness to learn would serve him well. Boone was fascinated by and respectful of Indian ways as a kid. He spent considerable time with Native Americans, studying their culture, and learning their woodland hunting, tracking, and survival skills. He learned the birdsongs of local avian life, studied the use of plants for medicinal purposes, learned Indian crafts. He was a proficient enough hunter that by age twelve he was providing game meat for his family. His gift for frontier life was clear very early on. In a way he was a frontiersman savant, like those 7-year-olds who play Rachmaninoff as if it’s no big deal. By fifteen he was considered the finest hunter in the area. [image] Daniel Boone by Alonzo Chappel – circa 1861 - From the National Portrait Gallery, via Wikimedia He had considerable respect for his wife, Rebecca, maintaining impressive wisdom about their relationship. After he had been away on a long hunt, for a year, for example, he returned home to be presented with a new daughter. He could count high enough to figure that the child was not his. Rebecca told him that she had thought he was dead (not an unlikely excuse at the time) and had fallen for someone who looked very much like Daniel, his younger brother. Daniel coped, noting with an impressive sense of humor that he had married a full-blooded woman, not a portrait of a saint, raised the girl as his own, and was grateful that Rebecca had at least kept it in the family. He confronts many personal challenges over the years, losing several children (he and Rebecca had ten) to illness or Indian attacks. The book opens with the torture and murder of his teenage son, James. He is called on time and time again to work with militia or government military units. He served with the British in their conflict with their French rivals for North American influence. He was a part of many of the conflicts that took part in the western colonial lands in the late 18th century. I had not heard of any of these. Drury and Clavin point out their often very surprising significance. Boone was not initially cast to star in this novel. Drury and Clavin, with more than a few history book pelts in their saddlebags, had written about the wars waged on the plains Indians, many of whom had been pushed west by the advancing white invaders, and wanted to trace that process back. The book covers, roughly, the period from the 1730s,when Boone was born, to 1799, when he moved his family west to Missouri. The book was supposed to be about how the Indians had been driven out of the land between the Appalachians and the Mississippi. In doing their research, however, Boone kept turning up, a Zelig-like character, involved in many of the seminal events of his time. Served with a British regiment? Check. Served with George Washington? Check. Developed the primary trail through the Cumberland Gap? You betcha. He even established a town that would be named after him, Boonesborough, and led the defense of a western fort, the loss of which might have changed the outcome of the American Revolution. The man really was a legend in his own time. A natural leader, he partook of many of the important battles that occurred between settlers, through their militias and their English backers, and both the native people they were attempting to displace and their French allies. He functioned as a diplomat as well, respected by many of the Indians and seen as a man of his word, not a common attribute at the time. And so he became the narrative thread that pulled together a large number of related, but disconnected parts. The frontier in the 18th century was the Appalachian Mountains. The Wild, Wild West was the land between the Appalachians and the Mississippi. The English had entered into treaties with Indian tribes that basically drew a line there. We will allow our colonists to advance only so far, and no farther. The colonists, however, were more than happy to roll their eyes, mutter a “whatever” or the 18th century equivalent, and continue pushing westward, making life difficult for just about everyone. I was reminded of contemporary settlers, eager to occupy land outside their legal realm. At least some of this westward movement was driven by land speculation, including by some founding father sorts. I know it is tough to believe that real-estate developers might be anything other than sober, law-abiding capitalists, but, like the poor, it appears that we will always have them with us. Drury and Clavin offer a look at the diverse tribes that occupied the areas in conflict, showing differences among them. One particularly horrifying episode involved a group of Indians who had converted to the Moravian faith, a sect of Christianity. They were pacifists, took up no arms, but were slaughtered anyway by a group of American Rangers in what became known as the Moravian Massacre, a shameful episode, widely talked about at the time. We also see leaders of one tribe, in negotiations, willingly ceding land to their white counterparts, when they, in fact, had no hold over that land at all. I was reminded of the contemporary situation in Afghanistan, among other places, where tribal allegiances easily trump larger national demands. Many of the most effective, and memorable of Indian leaders are shown, impressive in their tactical leadership, creativity, and tenacity. The American Revolution was more an eastern than western conflict, but there were times when battles on the western frontier might have determined a different outcome to the colonial attempt to separate from the motherland. These were mostly, no, they were entirely, news to me. It is in learning about so many of these turning points that the value of the book is most manifest. If, like me, your knowledge of American history has been shaped primarily by what we learned in grade school, high school, and college, and absorbed from popular culture, you will get a very strong sense of just how much we do not know, and had never suspected. In a way, it was like opening up the back of a mechanical watch and seeing all the intricate gears at work, impacting each other to produce the simple result of indicating the time of day. Getting there is not so simple. Nor is truly appreciating how 21st century America came to be what it is today. This book offers an up-close look at some of those gears. My reading experience of this book was wildly divergent. I found it to be a very difficult read for the first half, at least, dragging myself through anywhere from ten to thirty pages a day for what seemed forever. Even then, I recognized that there was a lot of valuable information to be absorbed, so stuck with it. It is true that there are a lot of characters passing through these pages, a bounty of place names, a plethora of battles, skirmishes, and conflicts that were significant and interesting. But it felt so overwhelming that the TMI sirens were blaring repeatedly. But at a certain point, some of the characters, through repeated appearance, became recognizable. Oh, yeah, I remember him now. Wasn’t he the one who…? Yep, that’s the guy. At a certain point it was not a duty to return to the book, fulfilling a felt obligation, trying to learn something, but a joy. Quite a switch, I know. But as I read the latter half of the book, it became clear that this was not just a rich history book, but quite an amazing adventure story, a saga, filled with deeds heroic and dastardly. There are many compelling characters in these pages, and so many ripping yarns that reading this became like sailing through something by George R. R. Martin. Taking the analogy to the next step, I have zero doubt that, with the many compelling narratives at play in this book, it would make a fantastic GoT-level TV series. It certainly has the blood and gore to play at that level, the territorial rivalries, the vanity, backstabbing, the double-dealing, the battles, sieges, murders, tortures and war crimes, but also the underlying content to give it all a lot more heft. This is how nations are created. This is how they grow. These are the people who paid the price for that creation. These are the decisions that were made, the promises broken and kept, the lies told, the excuses offered. Sorry, no dragons, or other mythical beasts, but there is, at the core, a bona fide legend. (James Fenimore Cooper’s Last of the Mohicans was inspired by Boone rescuing his kidnapped daughter, Jemima) Thankfully, it will require no blood for you to check this one out, and only a modest amount of treasure. Like the Cherokee, the tribes north of the Ohio River strongly suspected that America’s War for Independence was being fought over Indian land despite high-minded slogans about taxation without representation. It was the Shawnee who recognized the earliest that this internecine conflict among the whites could only end badly for the tribe should the rapacious colonists prevail. Native American support of the Crown, in essence, was the lesser of two evils. It was not the British, after all, who had begun desecrating Kanta-ke with cabins and cornfields.Review first posted – May 21, 2021 Publication dates ----------April 20, 2021 - hardcover ----------March 15, 2022 - trade paperback I cross-posted this review on my site, Coots's Review. Stop by, say Hi! I received this book as an e-pub from St Martin’s Press via NetGalley in return for a fair review. No raccoons, beavers, or other wildlife were harmed providing headgear used during the writing of this review. =============================EXTRA STUFF Links to Bob Drury’ personal site, and to Tom Clavin’s personal and FB pages Items of Interest -----C-Span - Interview with Drury and Clavin - video - 50:08 – This one is all you will need -----Gulliver’s Travels - Boone’s favorite book -----National Museum of American History - The saga of Davy Crockett's coonskin cap -----Wiki on the Moravian Massacre -----Wiki for Last of the Mohican -----Gutenberg – full text of Last of the Mohicans ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Apr 08, 2021
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May 08, 2021
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May 17, 2021
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Hardcover
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1982129476
| 9781982129477
| 1982129476
| 3.66
| 9,770
| Mar 02, 2021
| Mar 02, 2021
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really liked it
| ”Close your eyes and count to ten,” he whispered. I felt his breath on my cheek. The barrel of the gun was hard and cold against my forehead. ”Close your eyes and count to ten,” he whispered. I felt his breath on my cheek. The barrel of the gun was hard and cold against my forehead.Thus begins The Babysitter, a telling of growing up unaware that one of the author’s favorite adults was not who she’d thought. [image] Liza Rodman - image from Simon & Schuster – Photo by Joel Benjamin In 2005, Liza Rodman, then in her forties, was working on the thesis for her undergraduate degree when she began having frequent nightmares. It was not her first such experience. She had had these for a long time, but all of a sudden they were happening every night. In one, her husband was trying to kill her with a fireplace poker. Another featured a man killing nurses and eating their hearts. The dreams kept coming, with a faceless man chasing her, always with a weapon. She would wake up as her dream self was about to crash through a window, fleeing for her life. [image] Jennifer Jordan - image from her site – photo by Jeff Rhoads Clearly there was motivation to figure out this puzzle, so she started writing about them, incorporating them into her thesis, over a two year period, drawing out more and more details. One dream-site was The Royal Coachman motel where she, her mother, and sister had lived for a time in Provincetown. Another was Bayberry Bend, a P-town motel her mother had owned. Slowly the process moved along, six months of regular dreams, more images, months more of nightmares, until she saw the face, a familiar one, someone she hadn’t seen since she was a kid, a handyman hired to work at the motel where her mother was employed. His mother worked at the motel too. He was one of a series of people who took care of her and her sister, a really nice guy, one of the few adults who were kind to them, who never yelled at or hit them, who took them around with him in the motel’s utility truck, on chores, to the dump, to his garden in the woods, but who had disappeared when she was ten. This was not all that unusual for the adult males who scooted through her childhood. Why would she be having dark dreams about that guy? So she decides to ask her mother, then in her 70s, what this might all mean. “Did something happen to me back then that you’re not telling me?” I said, suddenly wondering if it did.Oh, is that all? Not all that surprising from Betty. Liza’s divorced mom was not exactly the best. While she did manage to keep body and soul together for herself and her two girls, she was frequently cruel to Liza, for no reason that the child could fathom. Mom, in fact is a major focus of the book, as chapters flip back and forth, more or less, between a focus on Tony and a focus on Liza and her relationship with her mother. [image] Antone Charles “Tony” Costa, Provincetown handyman and murderer of four young women. (Photo courtesy Barnstable County Identity Bureau) – image from the author’s site Who was this guy? Tony Costa never got to know his father, who had drowned trying to save a fellow seaman in New Guinea near the end of World War II, when Tony was only eight months old. He would be obsessed with his war hero dad for the rest of his life. There were early signs of trouble with Tony. At age seven he claimed to have been visited regularly by a man in his bedroom at night, an actual intruder? a fantasy? an obsession? He said the man looked like his father. He stood out among his peers during summers in Provincetown, his mother’s birthplace, cooler, smarter, and more “inside himself” than anyone else, according to a kid he hung out with there. Then there was the taxidermy kit. Lots of killing of small animals, neighborhood pets going missing, yet never a successful display of a stuffed animal. There is no mention of bed-wetting in his psychopath Bingo card, but who knows? We know he was raped as a pre-teen, and was probably one of several victims of sexual abuse by a Catholic priest in Provincetown. So his potential for madness certainly had some outside assistance. He was accused of attempting to rape a young girl as a teen. [image] Jen and Liza, Northampton, 1979 - image from Rodman’s site Tony was smart and handsome, but had terrible judgment, a ne’er do well, capable at work but unable to hold onto a job. He became a heavy drug user and local dealer. Clearly this guy had some charisma (as well as a considerable supply of illegal substances) and a way with young teens. A pedophile who married his pregnant fourteen-year-old girlfriend, he kept a crowd of young acolytes around him unable or unwilling to see through his line of distilled, grandiose, narcissistic bullshit. Cult-leader stuff. There is a Manson-like quality to him. And, like most narcissists, he was never willing to accept any responsibility for his own actions, always insisting that people were out to get him, blaming others for things he had done. [image] The VW Tony stole after murdering its owner. A local spotted it in the woods and notified the local police, which spelled doom for Tony Costa - image from the author’s FB pages There is more going on here than personal profiles of the major actors. A lot is made of how different from the mainstream Provincetown was, particularly during the tourist season. The ethos was much more accepting of whatever than most places. With people coming and going so much, it was custom-made for a predator. It was the 60s, man, drugs, sex, and rock ‘n roll, and kids taking off for adventures, whether drug-related or not, and thus not necessarily raising instant alarms when they went missing. In 1971, for example, I bought an old Post Office truck at auction for three hundred bucks, and drove across country with three friends. (well, tried, we never actually made it across the continent) No cellphone, no regular check-ins. We didn’t exactly file a flight plan. If we had come to a bad end, no one would have known, or been alarmed back home for weeks. This is something a lot of people did. Of course, we were not runaways, and we were not female. That would have been a whole other order of business. The cops in Provincetown took a lackadaisical attitude toward worried parents looking for missing progeny. “Don’t worry. I’m sure they will turn up in due time.” And they were probably right, mostly. Except, sometimes they weren’t. It took a lot of pushing from those concerned about the missing young women to get the police to pay much attention. Rodman and Jordan provide a very detailed look at the various police departments that became involved in Tony’s case, both the occasional good police work and the ineptitude of inter-departmental communications. Sound familiar? The locals were slow to allow for the possibility that there was a killer in their midst. Even today, there is an urge to protect one of their own, despite it being fifty years since the events of the book. “I got threats when I wrote this book,” Liza says. It’s a loving portrait of the town, but not especially flattering. “I have a comfort level there that I don’t have anywhere else. Even in the face of this book.” - from The Provincetown Independent [image] It was her sister’s 8th birthday. At the moment Liza was making a face at the camera, Tony was leading two young women into the Truro woods, where he would murder and bury them. - image from the author’s FB pages One of the things about true crime books is that there is an element of suspense that is lacking. We know that little Liza will grow up to write this book, so we know that Tony did not kill her. This makes it more like a Columbo episode, knowing that the bad guy will get got, but enjoying seeing how that ultimately happens. That said, this is not a straight-up true crime effort. It is a fusion of true crime with memoir. Half of the book is about Liza’s childhood, her relationship with her mother in particular. It is an interesting look at how someone can survive a bad parent-child relationship. Showing how things were for Liza at home makes her a more sympathetic narrator for the other story. Geez, ya poor kid. I sure hope nothing else bad happens t’ya. And it makes it much more understandable how a kid who was starved for adult affection and attention would be drawn to an adult who was offering kindness and interest. I did not get the frisson of fear reading this that pervaded in another true crime book, I'll Be Gone in the Dark. Maybe because the killer in this one was long ago jailed, whereas the California killer had not yet been arrested when that book came out. But there is a certain vertigo, like walking near a cliff edge, blindfolded, only to realize the danger you were in when you take it off. It is distinctly possible that Liza might have found her way into Tony’s special garden if he had managed to stay out of jail for a few more years. Liza was like the little girl playing with Frankenstein's monster in the movie, not realizing that he was more than just a large playmate, and seemingly friendly soul. Whew! Rodman had been working on this project for about thirteen years. It happened that, in 2018, Jordan, a professional writer, was casting about for her next book project (She had previously published four books.) when she thought of her dear friend, Liza, (they had met in college) who was thrilled at the suggestion that they collaborate. So, sixteen years of research in all and here it is. An in depth look at a monstrous series of events, a sick individual, an interesting place in a time of upheaval, a difficult childhood, an odd friendship, and a very close call. The Babysitter is an engaging, informative read that will make you appreciate your sane parents, most likely, and appreciate your luck even more in never having had such a person as Tony in your life. (You haven’t, right?) His coterie of teenagers, his stash of pills, and his marijuana helped mask his ever-increasing feelings of inferiority; by surrounding himself with idolizing acolytes who needed a hero, he could feel more in control, sophisticated, confident, and, of course, more intelligent. Review first posted – March 5, 2021 Publication dates ----------Hardcover - March 2, 2021 ----------Trade Paperback - June 14, 2022 I received an ARE of The Babysitter from Atria in return for an honest review. I did not charge them my usual rate of ten bucks an hour and whatever I want to eat from their fridge. [image] [image] [image] I have posted the entire review on my site, Coot’s Reviews. Stop by and say Hi! ===========================EXTRA STUFF Links to Liza Rodman’s ’s personal, FB, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Twitter pages Links to Jennifer Jordan’s personal and FB pages Interviews -----Red Carpet Crash – February 24, 2021 - Interview: Authors ‘Liza Rodman And Jennifer Jordan’ Talk Their Book The Babysitter: My Summers With A Serial Killer - audio – 17:02 - definitely check this one out -----New York Post - February 27, 2021 - How I discovered my babysitter Tony Costa was a serial killer by Raquel Laneri -----The Provincetown Independent – February 24, 2021 - Remembrance of Serial Murders Past by Howard Karren -----WickedLocal.com – February 23, 2021 - In new memoir, local serial killer Tony Costa babysat two youngsters by Susan Blood Items of Interest -----Frankenstein playing with sweet young Maria -----Columbo - or substituting for whodunit the howchatchem -----My review of I'll Be Gone in the Dark Songs/Music The author's site provides a link to a considerable list of 39 songs mentioned in the book. But you have to have a membership to hear the full songs on Spotify instead of just the clips that are available on Rodman’s site. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Feb 14, 2021
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Feb 22, 2021
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Mar 03, 2021
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Hardcover
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1501198505
| 9781501198502
| 1501198505
| 4.14
| 1,356
| Aug 27, 2020
| Jan 05, 2021
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it was amazing
| Like a bird flying repeatedly into a pane of glass, I kept seeking Heathcote. Each time I reached out for him, the crack yawned open just a little Like a bird flying repeatedly into a pane of glass, I kept seeking Heathcote. Each time I reached out for him, the crack yawned open just a little wider, until eventually. I hurtled straight through.-------------------------------------- How do you let go of someone you never had?Charlie Gilmour was living in southeast London when his partner’s sister came across an abandoned chick. Magpies leave home far too soon—long before they can really fly or properly fend for themselves. For weeks after they fledge their nests, they’re dependent on their parents for sustenance, protection, and an education too. But this bird’s parents are nowhere to be seen. They’re nor feeding it, or watching it, or guarding it; no alarm calls sound as a large apex predator approaches with footfalls made heavy by steel-toed boots. It could be no accident that the bird is on the ground. If food was running short, a savage calculation may have been performed, showing that the only way to keep the family airborne was to jettison the runt.[image] From infancy to adulthood – From Charlie’s eulogy for Heathcote –photos by Polly Sampson and Charlie This small bird with a huge personality caught his attention. Charlie’s struggles to care for, to raise, this raucous magpie parallels his growth as a person, and his lifelong struggle to get to know the man who had abandoned him as a an old boyhood dream Of having a jackdaw on your shoulder, like a pirate. Whispering secrets in your ear Charlie seizes on this connection when he discovered the poem his father had written about the experience. “Initially it was just meant to be a light-hearted story about this magpie that came to live with me, roosted in my hair, shat all over my clothes and stole my house keys. When my biological father died, though, it became a much, much more complicated story. Honestly, I really didn’t know what the book was about until I was quite far into the writing process.” - From the Vanity Fair interviewWilliams was quite a character, a merry prankster, a Peter Pan sort, grandly creative but not the best at responsibility, able to charm all those around him, doing magic tricks, persuading people that he really was there for them, while never really being able to handle the demands or needs of the people who needed him most, leaving domestic carnage in his wake. Charlie had never really understood why, one day, he suddenly just got up and flew the coop on him and his mother, Polly Samson. This memoir tracks Charlie’s quest to make sense of the father he never really knew. [image] Charlie Gilmour and his beloved magpie Benzene – image from Vanity Fair - photo by Sarah Lee Charlie lucked out in the parent department in another way. When Mom remarried, it was to David Gilmour of Pink Floyd fame. None of David’s music career is addressed here. But he is shown as a stand-up guy, a supportive, understanding, and loving father who takes Charlie under his wing by adopting him. Absent fathers are hardly uncommon. In 97 percent of single parent families, it’s the mother who ends up taking responsibility for the kids. The child’s impulse to seek them out is just as widespread: psychiatrists call it “father hunger”. I was lucky: I was adopted, and the man who became my dad is both a brilliant man and a brilliant parent. But the longing to know your maker is something that lives on. - from the Public reading Room pieceWe follow the growth of Charlie along with Benzene. It is made clear early on that a magpie presents both challenges and delights that are uncommon in human-critter relations. Tales of bird behavior that might have one pulling out hair in clumps (which might actually be useful, as the bird stores food in Charlie’s hair) are told with warmth, and, frequently, hilarity. My favorite of these occurs when Benzene is under the sway of a nesting instinct, having settled on the top of the fridge as a place on which to construct her DIY nest. At a birthday party for her: My dad strums her a song; my younger sister reads a poem; and a family friend, a venerable literary academic named John, unwillingly provides the sex appeal. This rather reserved man of letters is too polite to do anything but quote Shakespeare as Benzene places her birthday bluebottles and beetles lovingly up his sleeve and tugs the hem of his trousers insistently nestward. [image]= Heathcote Williams planning one of the Windsor free festivals in his Westbourne Park squat, London, in 1974 - Image from his obit in the Guardian - Photo by Richard Adams Charlie’s nesting life is also under development. After he marries his partner and they talk about growing their family, he must confront his fears of being a parent himself. Nature vs nurture. Will he be the absentee his biological father was, or the rock-solid mensch of a parent he lucked into in David Gilmour? Clearly a concern that requires some resolution before going ahead and fertilizing an egg. The issue extends to a question of mental illness. Heathcote had been ill-behaved enough to get institutionalized. It was certainly the case that his behavior often crossed the line from eccentric to certifiable. Did Charlie inherit his father’s proclivities? Is genetics destiny? Charlie had committed some behavioral excesses of his own, consuming vast quantities of illegal substances, which fueled some extremely bad behavior. This landed him on the front pages of the local tabloids, swinging from a beloved and respected war memorial during a protest, and then in prison. [image] Charlie with David Gilmour – image from The Guardian - photo by Sarah Lee Charlie takes us through the attempts he made for many years to connect with Heathcote, but his father offered only teases of interest, always managing to disappear before Charlie could latch on, a hurtful bit of legerdemain. In addition to the title, the names, which largely focus on feather development, given to the five parts of the book, set the tone. All the expected imagery is used throughout, including fledging to nest-building, to mating behavior, to molting, egg-laying and so on. It could easily have been overdone, but I found it charming. In rooting about in Heathcote’s history Charlie offers us, in addition to his personal tale, some of Heathcote’s outrageous adventures from back in the day. Charlie’s personal growth as a person adds heft. I was reminded of a few other memoirs. In Hollywood Park, musician and writer Mikel Jollett tries, a lot more successfully than Charlie, to connect with his missing father, confronting issues of nature vs nurture. Helen MacDonald’s H is for Hawk looks at her training a goshawk as a coping mechanism to help in grieving for and remaining connected to her late father, similar in feathery subject matter, although it is quite a different book. Alan Cumming, in Not My Father’s Son, looks at the damage his father had done to him, trying to figure out how this mercurial man had become so cruel, as Charlie tries to figure out how his mercurial, if not overtly cruel, father had become so nurturing-phobic. John Grogan’s Marley and Me looks at the difficulties of caring for a difficult pet, and the corresponding rewards. It is not necessary to love the memoirist to enjoy their book, but that is not an issue here. Charlie behaved rather poorly, both as a child and an early twenty-something, but learned his lesson, grew up, straightened out, and became a likable, decent sort, a very good writer who is very well able to communicate the struggles through which he has grown. It is easy to root for him to get to the bottom of what made Heathcote tick, and to find a way to make peace with what their minimal relationship had been. His writing is accessible, warm, moving, and at times LOL funny. You will need a few tissues at the ready by the end. Just for padding your roost, of course. In the Archive, the sour smell of mold is somehow even more overpowering than it was at Port Eliot, as if the material is rebelling against the light. At the end of each day I come away filthy, sneezing, and feeling lousy—but I keep going back for more. I need this. My approach is far from methodical. I attack the body of words and images like a carrion bird, looking for the wound that will yield to my prying beak, the original injury that unravels the man. I peel back layers of skin, pick over the bones, snip my way to the heart of the matter. A patchwork biography begins to emerge; a rough story told in scavenged scraps. It feels almost like stealing, like robbing the grave, except it’s not the treasure that interests me. Heathcote’s glories get hardly a glance. It’s the traumas I’m searching for. Answers to those same old questions. Why does a person disappear? What makes a man run from his child? Why was Heathcote so afraid of family? What forces guided that nocturnal flight in Spring so many years ago? Review first posted – February 19, 2021 Publication dates ----------January 5, 2021 - hardcover ----------January 11, 2022 - trade paperback [image] [image] [image] [image] I received an ARE of this book from Scribner in return for an honest review. No feathering of nests was involved. Thanks, folks. And thanks to MC for bringing this to my attention. You know who you are. =============================EXTRA STUFF Links to the author’s personal, FB, Instagram, Tumblr, and Twitter pages Interviews -----The One Show - The One Show: Elton John meets Charlie Gilmour -----David Gilmour: ‘I’ve been bonded to Charlie since he was three. We were incensed by the injustice’ - Charlie and David Gilmour on their relationship and history -----Bookpage - Charlie Gilmour: From feathers to fatherhood by Alice Cary -----Vanity Fair - Birds of a Feather. Interview with Charlie Gilmour by Chiara Nardelli Nonino Songs/Music -----Donovan - The Magpie -----The Beatles - Blackbird Items of Interest from the author -----Vogue - What Raising a Magpie Taught Me About My Famous, Troubled Father -----Waterstones - a promo vid for the book - 1:52 -----5x15 Stories - Featherhood - a story about birds and fathers -----The Guardian - ‘One spring morning my dad vanished’: the son of poet Heathcote Williams looks back -----Public Reading Rooms - Heathcote Williams: Eulogy to the Dad I never knew ----- Charlie’s articles for Vice Items of Interest -----BBC - My Unusual Life | The Man Who Lives With a Magpie - a short doc on Charlie -----Wiki on Pin feathers -----The Guardian - David Gilmour: ‘I’ve been bonded to Charlie since he was three. We were incensed by the injustice’ -----Straight Up Herman – an arts journal blog - Being Kept by a Jackdaw - Heathcote Williams’ poem Other memoirs of interest -----Hollywood Park by Mikel Jollett -----H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald -----Not My Father’s Son by Alan Cumming -----Marley and Me by John Grogan ...more |
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Feb 02, 2021
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Feb 10, 2021
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Jan 13, 2021
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198213173X
| 9781982131739
| 198213173X
| 4.17
| 24,624
| Sep 15, 2020
| Sep 15, 2020
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it was amazing
| [According to Jared Kushner] “In the beginning…20 percent of the people we had thought Trump was saving the world, and 80 percent thought they were [According to Jared Kushner] “In the beginning…20 percent of the people we had thought Trump was saving the world, and 80 percent thought they were saving the world from Trump. Now, I think we have the inverse. I think 80 percent of the people working for him think he’s saving the world, and 20 percent—maybe less now—think they’re saving the world from Trump.”-------------------------------------- Mattis summarized, “When I was basically directed to do something that I thought went beyond stupid to felony stupid, strategically jeopardizing our place in the world and everything else, that’s when I quit.”Bob Woodward has been reporting on American presidents for a long time. He and Carl Bernstein, reporters at The Washington Post, broke into public consciousness with their coverage of the Watergate scandal back in the early 1970s, culminating with their book, All the Presidents Men, one of the great political books of all time. In the intervening years Bob Woodward has continued covering politics in DC. He still holds the title of Associate Editor at the Post, but his production these days tends toward the long form. He has written 19 books since that first one. [image] Bob Woodward- image from The Guardian - photo by Christopher Lane In another collaboration with Carl Bernstsein, The Final Days, he wrote about Richard Nixon’s last year in power. Rage covers seven months of Donald Trump’s last year in office (unless the Donald manages to pull a coup out of a MAGA hat), so maybe The Penultimate Months, as of this writing. (November 2020, after Trump lost to Joe Biden) No talking to the presidential portraits this time. No excess consumption of liquid spirits. But, of course, one must always wonder what pharmaceuticals have been propping up the 45th president during the entirety of his term, so maybe. At least it is not something that is reported on or speculated about here. I am sure there will be more than a few reports, whether leaked to the press or included in memoirs, of Trump’s antics and gracious concession in the months after his electoral loss. Woodward had seventeen on-the-record conversations with Trump (that is what it says in the book flap, but on 60 minutes he says 18 and in the Axios interview he says 19) for this book, some in person, some by phone. “I call him the night prowler. I think it’s true. He doesn’t drink. He has this kind of savage energy and it comes through in some of the recordings I’ve released. It comes through in his rallies. So for me, it’s a window into his mind. It’s much like, as somebody said, the Nixon tapes where you see what he’s actually thinking and doing.” - from the Guardian interviewHe also had access to a vast range of official documents, and spoke with many others in the administration. While those conversations were conducted as “deep background,” it is pretty clear who made themselves available. Primary among these are Dan Coats, the erstwhile Director of National Intelligence, James Mattis, Trump’s first Secretary of Defense, Rex Tillerson, the former Secretary of State, even Jared Kushner, still the son-in-law. One can expect that they all want to portray themselves in the best possible light. I rolled my eyes a lot, particularly, when Jared was handed the mike. Woodward concentrates on their interactions with Trump, leaving aside many other issues relevant for each. Woodward shows the extreme degree of disorganization in the administration governed by impulse, the chaos that is the Trumpian way. It had Mattis sleeping at the job, terrified of an imminent nuclear war with North Korea during the period when the boss was joyfully taunting Kim Jung Un as “Little Rocket Man.” Most impressive is the tracking of Trump’s reaction to the Corona Virus Pandemic from January to July 2020. This permeates the book, which opens with Trump being informed by his National Security Advisor, Robert O’Brien, on January 28, 2020, that Corona would be the largest national security threat of his presidency. Matt Pottinger, the deputy National Security Advisor, a China expert, had done some research with his contacts in China, and reported to the president about having been told by a Chinese expert ”Don’t think SARS 2003…Think influenza pandemic of 2018”, which killed 675,000 Americans. Trump waited three days to close travel from China, and continued to downplay the disease in public in the months ahead. Most of the outrages emanating from this book have had their time in the media. Playing down the significance of the Corona Virus is first among these, as Trump claims that he did not want to panic the public. Utter nonsense, of course. He was more than happy to panic the public with apocryphal reports of an invasive caravan of immigrants approaching our southern border, for example. More recently he has tried panicking suburban women by claiming that their nice, safe, white burbs would soon be overrun by “those people,” were Joe Biden to be elected. The public is nothing more to Donald Trump than a collection of marks waiting to be conned. The only things Trump cared about re the pandemic were how an increase in C-19 cases would make him look, and its potential impact on the stock market. Maybe co-first was the game Trump played with North Korea, noted above, that brought the nation to the brink of nuclear war. In talking about the BLM movement, Woodward points out to Trump that they are both privileged, older white men who have, in a way, lived in a cave, with limited ability to understand the experience of people outside their group. “No,” Trump said. “You really drank the Kool-Aid, didn’t you? Just listen to you,” he said, his voice mocking and incredulous. “Wow, I don’t feel that at all.”The establishment of the Mueller Investigation in May 2017 was hailed as a triumph of institutional integrity over venal self-dealing. Turns out, not so much, despite the holy aura vested in the probe by the mainstream media. In fact, it was a dodge. There was a real investigation that had begun in the FBI, led by Andrew McCabe, a die-hard Republican, looking into the connections between Trump, his campaign, and Vladimir Putin. McCabe was seen as being too straight a shooter to be trusted with this, so establishing the probe was a way to push him to the side. During a House Judiciary Committee hearing on June 28, 2018, Republican representative from Florida Ron DeSantis…remarked to [Rod] Rosenstein, “They talk about the Mueller investigation—it’s really the Rosenstein investigation. You appointed Mueller. You’re supervising Mueller.”And Rosenstein made sure, by establishing a rigid chain of command, that McCabe would be kept well out of the loop. One of the more interesting items in the book, one not covered much in media, was the notion of controversy as an accelerant for policy positions. ”Controversy elevates message,” Kushner said. This was his core understanding of communications strategy in the age of the internet and Trump.And Trump is certainly a genius (however unstable) at creating and sustaining controversy. Michael Cohen, in his book Disloyal, makes the related point that Trump has always had a genius for manipulating the media. One does not think of Bob Woodward as being a particularly funny guy, but one of the things I enjoyed about the book was Woodward’s wry commentaries after reporting. There are many of these. Here is a small example: I told him people I talked to were saying the presidential race between him and Biden was now a coin toss.another “It’s funny, the relationships I have, the tougher and meaner they are, the better I get along with them. You know? Explain that to me someday, okay?”Woodward is indeed a master at getting people to talk, not that Donald Trump needs much prompting, particularly when the subject matter is his personal favorite. But Woodward demonstrates impressive patience and perseverance in coping with an interviewee who seemed to have the attention span of a goldfish. This talent is one that former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates appreciated, in an interview with Mike Allen for Politico. "I think he's obviously a very astute journalist," Gates said to POLITICO's Mike Allen…"I would have really liked to recruit him for the CIA because he has an extraordinary ability to get otherwise responsible adults to spill [their] guts to him, on background, nothing there for the historians, but his ability to get people to talk about stuff they shouldn't be talking about is extraordinary and maybe unique." - from the Politico articleDonald Trump is an angry person. Always aggrieved, always looking to blame others for his failures, hurling invective and employing demagoguery to rouse an unanalytical base to support rank foolishness. Woodward opens the book with a couple of quotes by Trump about his capacity for inducing rage in people. It is certainly something at which he excels. But he remains clueless about how that works, which is no surprise, as Trump is clearly one of the least self-aware leaders we have ever had, hell, maybe one of the least self-aware people of his time. Here in November, 2020, as Trump does all he can to poison the democracy that elected him in 2016, as he does all he can to sow chaos in America’s foreign policy, as he does everything he can to seek revenge on government employees he deems insufficiently loyal, as he lies at an automatic firing rate that is impressive even for him, it is clear that along with disgust, the proper response to Trump is the one Woodward focuses on here. Rage will leave you more informed than you were before, but it will also leave you seething. If it does not, you are part of the problem. Review posted – 11/20/20 Publication date – 9/15/20 =============================EXTRA STUFF Links to the author’s personal, Twitter and FB pages Interviews -----The Guardian - The right man for the job: how Bob Woodward pinned Trump to the page by David Smith -----NPR - Interview With Bob Woodward, Part 1 by Mary Louise Kelly audio + transcript ----------Part 2 -----60 Minutes - Inside Donald Trump's 18 recorded interviews with Bob Woodward for his book "Rage" by Scott Pelley -----Axios on HBO - Bob Woodward: Full interview, Part 1 by Jonathan Swan My reviews of other books by the author -----2018 - Fear -----2010 - Obamas’s Wars -----2008 - The War Within Other books on Trump -----Too Much and Never Enough by Mary Trump -----Disloyal by Michael Cohen -----A Warning by Anonymous -----Tyrannical Minds by Anonymous -----Fascism by Madeleine K. Albright -----Trumpocracy by David Frum -----Unbelievable by Katy Tur There have been many books written about Trump and Trumpism, enough to warrant a shelf of their own. More particularly, there are two recent books, in addition to Rage, that have a lot to offer re getting a close, personal look at the man, Too Much and Never Enough, by Mary Trump, and Disloyal, by Michael Cohen. Both are well worth checking out. Items of Interest -----Washington Post - Woodward book: Trump says he knew coronavirus was ‘deadly’ and worse than the flu while intentionally misleading Americans by Robert Costa and Phil Rucker – This article includes links to tapes of some of Woodward’s conversations with Trump -----The Lincoln Project - Bloodlines ...more |
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Oct 02, 2020
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Nov 06, 2020
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Oct 02, 2020
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B0881YDNDD
| 3.82
| 90,076
| Jul 14, 2020
| Jul 14, 2020
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it was amazing
| As my father lay dying, Donald went to the movies. If he can in any way profit from your death, he’ll facilitate it, and then he’ll ignore the fact As my father lay dying, Donald went to the movies. If he can in any way profit from your death, he’ll facilitate it, and then he’ll ignore the fact that you died.So, you think your family’s nuts? Usually we have to wait for historians to delve back through the years of a president’s life, digging through letters and writings, interviewing any who might have interacted with them, checking their letters and writings, to cull relevant bits, suss out impactful events, discern motivations and understand how that president came to make the decisions he (still only he) made. Also, sift fact from spin or worse in former presidents’ memoirs and other writings [image] Mary Trump - image from Inside Edition It is quite likely that Donald Trump may be the most written about person, let alone politician, in modern American history. And despite his attempts, many of them, sadly, all too successful, to protect his information from the world, (still waiting on those tax returns) there are so many eyes looking his way, so many searchlights in the darkness, that details continue to emerge, daily, it seems. But there are few who have the sort of access available to a family member. Reporters and historians did not have the personal experiences of dealing with him in a household setting. His remaining siblings have their own reasons to keep their counsel, despite the odd secretly-taped statement that finds its way to the public arena. But we have something pretty close, if a generation removed. Not a sibling, but Donald’s niece, Mary Trump, daughter of the eldest of Fred Trump’s children, Freddy. She is not only a family member but a clinical psychologist to boot. While she was not present when Donald was a child, (he was 19 when she was born) she was as familiar as one could be with family who had been, and had personal exposure to him all her life, in addition to the many tales she heard from family members of Donald’s earlier days. The stories she tells paint a picture of how Donald came to be the person he is. She does not offer a hard diagnosis on how much might be genetic and how much nurture, but the implication is clear that it was a substantial mix of both. Whereas Mary [Donald’s mother] was needy, Fred [his father] seemed to have no emotional needs at all. In fact, he was a highly-functioning sociopath. Although uncommon, sociopathy is not rare, afflicting as much as 3 percent of the population. Seventy-five percent of those diagnosed are men. Symptoms of sociopathy include a lack of empathy, a facility for lying, an indifference to right and wrong, abusive behavior, and a lack of interest in the rights of others. Having a sociopath as a parent, especially if there is no one else around to mitigate the effects, all but guarantees severe disruption in how children understand themselves, regulate their emotions, and engage with the world.There are better sources for the details of Donald’s lifelong crime spree. What Mary Trump offers is a look into the poisoned tree from which this rotten apple dropped. One thing that stands out is that, even though Fred Sr encouraged all Donald’s worst qualities, there is rarely any sense that Donald had any positive ones beyond a superficial charm. In the Stephanopoulos interview, though, Mary talks about there having once been some kind inclinations in Donald, but they were squashed by his father. Even as a child, he delighted in bullying children smaller than himself, to the extent that Fred was encouraged to take him out of a school on whose board Fred sat. That must have been a fun conversation. Pop relocated Donald to the New York Military Academy, six miles north of West Point, in upstate New York. It was the equivalent of being sent to reform school for rich kids. A lot of the book focuses on Mary’s father, Freddy, the oldest of the siblings, the one expected to take over the business. He presumed he would be the head of his father’s company, but Pop never really gave him a chance, sticking him with relatively menial work. He was a kid who was kind, had friends, and interests other than his father’s business. This got him labeled as weak and a failure. Fred Senior preferred someone with what he considered a “killer” instinct, which translated into being as sociopathic as he was. He offered zero support for Freddy’s interest in flying, even though he had joined the United States Air Force ROTC in college and put in mad hours flying and training. Even after he secured a choice position as a pilot with TWA, the elite airline of the stars, flying their new 707 from Boston to Los Angeles, a pretty big deal at the time, his father regarded him as nothing more than a bus driver in the sky. But even after abandoning his flying career, and crawling back to his father, Fred Sr. never really gave him a chance at gaining any real authority. Donald, the second son, eight years younger, was more than happy to step into the favorite son shoes. He clearly had the temperament, the narcissism and malignant regard for others that his father so wanted to see in a successor. Mary offers some details on the business disasters that Donald wrought, his business talent pretty much as non-existent as his talent for dishonesty and self-promotion was vast. Even Mary bought into the spin for a long time, not realizing that Fred Sr. had been keeping Donald afloat with hundreds of millions in loans and often illegal gifts. It was when Donald asked her to ghostwrite one of his books that she did some actual research into him, followed him around, and realized just what a totally empty suit he truly was. There are plenty of quotes from this book making the rounds, a passel of stories. I will spare you the full list. But there are few things worth noting. ----------Donald’s disregard for women tracks with his father’s disregard for his wife, and even Donald’s dismissive treatment of her. ----------Donald even tried to steal his siblings’ inheritance, a ploy that was only sidetracked because Fred Sr was having a rare lucid day and smelled a rat, when his lawyer, whom Donald had recruited for this will-rewrite task, asked him to sign some papers. It was Donald’s mother who saw to it that the plot was foiled. ----------It is telling to see how Donald has recreated in his role as president the model set by his father for always keeping his children from any feeling of security. ----------He has inherited pop’s complete incapacity and/or unwillingness to accept any responsibility for his actions. But at some point you become responsible for yourself, and it is clear that whether he has the capacity or not, Donald never will. He will remain a spoiled child, a bully, a danger to anyone near him, and now, as someone with the instruments of national power at his disposal, an actual menace to the planet. One of the overarching feelings I had while reading this book was sadness. However awful Donald is today (and has been almost all his life), it is still a very sad thing for anyone to grow up in a household where a father’s love was not only unavailable, but in which even wanting such affection would be considered a sign of weakness, and cause for rejection and humiliation. Add to this a mother whose narcissism combined with physical illness to ensure that their interactions would be all about her, and never about him. Mary’s relationship with her grandmother, Donald’s mother, is also heart-breaking. Materials from the book are all over the print and digital media. The understandable focus there is on the actual content of the book. What happened, where, and when, what was said, by whom? How did Donald become so awful and what awful things has he done or said that we do not yet know about? Usually unmentioned, or maybe noted in passing, is what a bloody good read this book is. I found myself rapt while poring through it, and not just fascinated by the major multi-car pileup that is Donald’s life, but actually moved, particularly by the other main story Mary tells, that of her father’s demise. What a waste of a life, of an opportunity, and at the hands of madness. Trumps are not known for writing their own books. But Mary had an interest rarely, if ever, seen in the Trump family. It was love of books that set her apart when she was growing up… in what she describes as a “shitty Trump apartment” in the gritty housing projects of Jamaica, Queens, quite different to the rarefied air of the nearby Jamaica Estates where the rest of the family lived. That gave her a grounding in reality. She took the subway to school. And she devoured literature. In her memoir, she recounts that her grandfather’s house did not display a single book until her uncle published his ghostwritten The Art of the Deal in the late 1980s. “I started reading when I was three and a half,” Trump says. “My horizons were already broader than anyone else in the family simply by virtue of that.” - from the Financial Times interviewWhile Mary Trump does not have the objectivity of a true outsider looking at the family, that does not mean that she leaves her clinical toolbox unopened. She has a PhD in clinical psychology. She has observed and had reliable reports on a large swath of Donald’s life, and the lives of other family members, a solid grounding for offering a very well-informed, and analytically incisive, opinion about Donald and other family members. Her personal take on 45 is the best we are likely to ever have in terms of understanding the psychological roots and early journey into madness of our Psycho President. It is a frightening picture. We can only hope that we all get to live long enough to fully appreciate just how valuable it is. Andrew Cuomo, the governor of New York and currently the de facto leader of the country’s COVID-19 response, has committed not only the sin of insufficiently kissing Donald’s ass, but the ultimate sin of showing Donald up by being better and more competent, a real leader who is respected and effective and admired. Donald can’t fight back by shutting Cuomo up or reversing his decisions; having abdicated his authority to lead a nationwide response, he no longer has the ability to counter decisions made at the state level…What he can do in order to offset the powerlessness and rage he feels is to punish the rest of us. He’ll withhold ventilators or steal supplies from states that have not groveled sufficiently…What Donald thinks is justified retaliation is, in this context, mass murder. Review first posted – September 10, 2020 Publication date – July 14, 2020 [image] [image] [image] [image] =============================EXTRA STUFF Links to the author’s Twitter and FB pages Interviews -----ABC News – with George Stephanopoulos - George is a bit hostile, but it is a good interview overall -----Financial Times - Mary Trump: ‘At Least the Borgias supported the arts’ by Edward Luce -----The Guardian - Mary Trump on her Uncle Donald: ‘I used to feel compassion for him. That became impossible’ by David Smith -----Mother Jones - Watch: Mary Trump on Why Donald Trump Lies, Why He’s “Racist,” and Why She Wrote Her Book by David Corn -----MSNBC has chopped up Rachel Maddow’s interview with the author into bits. If I find a complete vid of that interview, I will add it here. Items of Interest -----Wikipedia entry for The Trump Family -----The Lincoln Project - Bloodlines ...more |
Notes are private!
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Aug 24, 2020
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Sep 05, 2020
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Sep 05, 2020
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Kindle Edition
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1250621569
| 9781250621566
| 1250621569
| 4.29
| 15,543
| May 05, 2020
| May 26, 2020
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it was amazing
| What do you do when you’re a scared-shitless kid that’s been faking it for so long? You bury it. You polish your smile and study until you can’t ev What do you do when you’re a scared-shitless kid that’s been faking it for so long? You bury it. You polish your smile and study until you can’t even focus your eyes. You buy yourself a big red sweater with an S across the chest, just like the superchild you once were. You try to prove them all wrong. You attempt to outrun it. But then you get injured and your mom goes insane and a kind man in a blue shirt with a trim black beard uses the words. Emotional abuse. Crossing physical boundaries, Trauma. Neglect. I feel like a blank space covered in skin.Who is that masked man? If all of your life you’ve worn a mask, what do you see in the mirror? A reflection of someone you aren’t. How can you know who you really are, or who you might become, if you see your world through cut-out holes? And the world never gets to see you, never gets to relate to you, the real you, behind your facade. Kinda tough to live your best life that way. Kinda tough to live a real life that way. And how did that mask get there in the first place? And how did it impact the nuts and bolts of your life? And is there any hope you can tear it off without losing the you beneath, pull it off slowly, maybe un-sew it from your face, a stitch at a time? [image] Mikel Jollett - image from his Twitter Who is that masked man, the kid from the cult, the pre-teen looking for thrills, the teenager who nearly killed himself, the long-distance-runner, the Stanford student, the substance abuser, the serial spoiler of relationships, the music-world journalist, the successful rock musician, the wonderful writer? Or are they all just different masks? [image] Synenon leader Charles Dederich - Image from San Diego State University The impetus to write the book was a recent one. Jollett had been writing and performing music with his band, Airborne Toxic Event, since 2005, a step sideways from his intention to pursue a writing career, and a closely linked redirection from his work as a music journalist. Then, in 2015, his father died, and Jollett says he was overwhelmed with grief and confusion. “I wondered why it hit me so hard, so I went back into my past—that day my mom took us out of the cult. I went in to lockdown and started to write.” He stayed with it for three years. - from the PW interviewThere was a lot to write about. This coming of age story begins when he was five. Jollett had the bad luck to be born into a bad situation. His parents were members of Synenon, a place that came to public prominence in the 1960s in California, a goto drug rehab community for a while. People charged with substance-related crimes were often sent there by California courts. It probably did some good in the beginning, but as the leader of Synenon, Chuck Dederich, became more and more unhinged and power mad, his not totally crazy community became a totally crazy cult. Not the best start for a new life. One of the rules in Synenon was that children were to be raised communally. So, even though mom and/or dad might be around, they were not the ones providing care. Have a nice life. “It was an orphanage!” Grandma screams. “That’s what you call a place where strangers raise your kids!” Grandma says that mom doesn’t even know who put us to bed or who woke us up or who taught us to read. She says we were sitting ducks. (We did play Duck Duck Goose a lot.) “You made them orphans, Gerry!” Grandma will point at us from her chair as we pretend not to listen.We follow Mik’s journey from his earliest memories of Synenon, raised by people other than his parents until Mom flees with him and his older brother in the dark of night. Most orphanages do not send goons to track down people, including children, who leave. Even out of the Synenon cult, Mik, his brother, Tony, and his mom, Gerry, were not safe. Mik gets to see a fellow “splittee” get beaten nearly to death by Synenon enforcers outside his new home. [image] Facing your dark side - image from Narcissism and emotional abuse.co.uk If this decidedly unstable beginning was not enough of a challenge, his mother was not the best of all possible parents. Is that a mom? Someone who you can’t ever remember not loving you? I know Mom doesn’t think that’s what it is but I do…She tells me I’m her son and she wanted kids so she wouldn’t be alone anymore and now she has us and it is a son’s job to take care of his mother.Gerry was just a weeeee bit narcissistic, to her children’s decided disadvantage. It would take Mik years to learn that the usual arrangement was that parents take care of children. [image] Image from collectiveevolution.com Jollett takes us through many stages of his life, successfully modulating the narrative to fit the age he is portraying in each. As he grows, his awareness increases and his interests broaden. It makes him, appropriately, an unreliable narrator as young Mik does not yet have the tools to see past the misinformation he is being given. It took my brother and I a long long time to piece together the reality that a functional adult might have about the situation, that we’d escaped a cult that had once done good things for addicts (including our father), that our mother was severely depressed, and that these experiences were very unique in some ways and quite common in others. So I wrote the book from that perspective, at least at the beginning: that of a child trying to piece together the reality of the changing world around him; because that’s how I experienced it. There were mysteries. What is a restaurant? (We’d never been in one). What is a car? A city? And, most devastatingly, what is a family? Because we simply didn’t know. - from the Celadon interviewBeing born into a cult and having a depressed, toxically narcissistic mother were two strikes already, but then pop, and other paternal family members had spent considerable time behind bars, and in both his paternal and his maternal trees there was a history of substance abuse, of one sort or many. You’d think Mik was destined to wind up an alcoholic and/or a drug addict and in jail. Is genetics destiny? This is a core battle he faced in his life. Another was to come to terms with how his strange upbringing affected how he related to other human beings, particularly to women. He talks a lot about how he presented a façade to the world, while keeping his truest self well back, if he even knew his true self at all. [image] Robert Smith mask - Image from funkyBunky.co Jollett endured years of poverty, and emotional abuse. He found outlets in criminal acts and substance abuse. But he also found other ways to fill his needs and channel his creativity. A close friend introduced him to the music that would push him in a new constructive direction. I go to a place in my head where I can be alone. Listening to Robert Smith sing his happy songs about how sad he feels is like he’s there too, like he has his Secret Place in his head where he goes and since he wrote a song about it, he’s right there in my headphones, so we’re in this Secret Place together. Me and Robert. It’s a place where we are allowed to be sad, instead of feeling like freaks of nature, us weirdos and orphans.A major change in Mik’s life is when he begins spending time with his father, Jimmy, and his father’s significant other, in Los Angeles, first summers, then, at age 11, moving there more permanently, Gerry having moved to Oregon with the boys when they were fleeing Synenon. It is a whole new world for him there, not just offering different ways to get into trouble, but the opportunity to get to know Jimmy and his father’s family, something that was not really possible in his earliest years, particularly as his mother had portrayed Jimmy negatively. I’d been told so many terrible things about him at a very young age. He was a heroin addict, an ex-con who’d done years in prison. He “left my mother for a tramp.” That was a common refrain. But none of it turned out to matter. He was clean by the time I was born and all I ever knew once I got to spend time with him, was this guy who would do anything for me. He was affectionate. He took us everywhere. He cared so deeply about our basic happiness. He had a great laugh and a quiet wisdom about him. He never cared what I became in life. He wanted me to be honest, to be interesting (or simply funny), and to be around. - from the Celadon interviewThe emotional core of the book is connections Jollett has, for good or ill, with the people in his life, friends, and particularly family. Jimmy was fond of betting on the ponies. He took Mik with him once he started visiting LA. Hollywood Park is the track they attended. It is where Mik has meaningful heart-to-hearts with his father. It is a place that lives in his imagination as well, a place where he can connect with his family across time. Will Mik grow up to be a ”Jollett Man,” a bad-ass tough guy who leans hard toward wildness, or something other? There are certainly strains in him that offer other possibilities. His athleticism, intellectual curiosity, academic licks, creativity, musical talent, and stick-to-itive-ness offer hope for a future different from his father’s. [image] Image from The Smiths and Morrissey FB pages As an adult, Mik finds a career in music, and gains insights into the musical creative process from some household names. He gains as well insights into his emotional state that help him understand the life he has been living. But the real core is how he got to that place to begin with. [image] Image from Invaluabl.com Jollett employs literary tools to great effect. For example, as an eight-year-old in Oregon, his family raised and slaughtered rabbits for food. In addition to this being a sign of the family’s poverty, it is clear that young Mik senses that he, too, is being raised in an emotional cage to provide sustenance of another sort. His writing is smooth and often moving. There are sum-up portions at the end of chapters that pull together what that chapter has been about. These bits tend toward the self-analytical, and are often poetic. …music makes me feel like I belong somewhere, that this person I don’t know, the one who swims beneath his life in a dark, chaotic, unknowable place, this one has a voice too.Mikel Jollett has written a remarkable memoir, offering not just a look at his dramatic and event-filled personal journey, but a peek out from the masks he wore to the times he lived through. While his actions and experiences covered a considerable swath, there is always, throughout his moving tale, a connection to family, to his mother, father, brother, various step-parents, his extended family, and closest friends. The power of these connections caused him considerable difficulty, but also made it possible for him to weather some major life storms. The odds are you will be moved by Jollett’s celebration of real human bonding, cringe at some of the challenges he had to endure, mumble an “oh, no,” or worse, as you see the missteps along his path, cheer for the triumphs when they come, and luxuriate in the beauty of his writing. Whatever else you may get from the book, it is clear that Mikel Jollett is unmasked as an outstanding writer. Hollywood Park is a sure winner of a read. Bet on it. One sentence [in The Scarlet Letter] stood out to me as I read on the edge of my bed. I marked the page: “No man, for any considerable period, can wear one face to himself, and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which may be the true.” It made me think of the Secret Place, the place I hide with Robert Smith. I know this face. I’ve learned not to tell anyone at school about Synanon or Dad in prison or…Mom in the bed staring up at the ceiling. It’s a mask, this face you create for others, one you hide behind as you laugh at jokes you don’t understand and skip uncomfortable details, entire years of your life, as if they simply didn’t happen. [image] Jollett (l.), with dad Jimmy and brother Tony -image from Publishers Weekly Review first posted – May 15, 2020 Publication dates ----------May 5, 2020 - hardcover ----------March 22, 2022 - trade paperback I received an ARE of this book from Celadon in return for an honest review. But, do they really know who they gave this book to? I could be anyone, pretending to be anyone. Thanks to MC, too. [image] [image] [image] [image] This review has been, or soon will be, cross-posted on my site, Coot’s Reviews. Stop by and say Hi! ==========In the summer of 2019 GR reduced the allowable review size by 25%, from 20,000 to 15,000 characters. In order to accommodate the text beyond that I have moved it to the comments section directly below. [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
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not set
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Apr 25, 2020
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Feb 07, 2020
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Hardcover
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1324003316
| 9781324003311
| 1324003316
| 4.06
| 7,791
| Oct 08, 2019
| Oct 08, 2019
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it was amazing
| Yes, the universe wants to kill us. But on the other hand, we all want to live. So let’s find a way together to deflect the asteroids, find the cur Yes, the universe wants to kill us. But on the other hand, we all want to live. So let’s find a way together to deflect the asteroids, find the cure to the next lethal virus, mitigate hurricanes, tsunamis, volcanoes, etc. This can only be enabled by the efforts of a scientifically and technologically literate public. Therein lies a hope on Earth far greater than ever promised by the act of prayer or introspection.It can be a bit of a challenge when talking about Neil deGrasse Tyson, deciding just where to start. Overall, one would have to say that He is the public face of space, this side of fiction, anyway. And speaking of fiction, he was cast in a recent Neal Stephenson novel, SevenEves, albeit with a nom du plume. He has published 14 books, hosted several science-focused TV series, including Cosmos, Star Talk, Origins, the Pluto Files and more. He is only the fifth ever head of the New York Planetarium, served on presidential science advisory councils, has been awarded NASA’s highest non-government-employee award. He is the teacher you wished you had for science, enthusiastic, knowledgeable, and encouraging, and with a wonderful sense of humor. [image] Neil deGrasse Tyson - image from his site And if that is not enough, he is a remarkably charming guy, and a wonderful writer. In a recent Late Show interview with Whoopi Goldberg (at 7:21 of the clip), when Stephen Colbert asked her who her favorite ever guest was, she said Tyson, because he could talk for three hours straight, and they would all be wonderful, informative hours. And if Whoopi loves spending time with the guy, really, who are we to argue? How do you defend yourself when you have received a letter that proclaims you a “pooh-pooh head” for your role in downgrading Pluto to dwarf-planet status? What can you say to people who challenge you on religion, God, philosophy, who see responsibility for the 9/11 assaults in celestial alignments? This book consists of NDT’s responses to about 75 letters he’s received over the years, on a wide range of subjects. He also writes about some personal feelings and events, like his relationship with his father, or more ethereal considerations of nature. And some are just for fun, like his selection of the most scientifically BS movies of all time, or a museum visitor picking up a display information error that had been there for a very long time, and which NDT had had a hand in approving. Oopsy. There are some very heart-warming passages in which he encourages young learners. He opens with a look at his early exposure to NASA, not as the inspiration it was for so many, but as consistent excluder of people like him. He writes a birthday note to NASA, which was born the same month as he was. …you should know that among my colleagues, I am the rare few in my generation who became an astrophysicist in spite of your achievements in space rather than because of them. For my inspiration, I instead turned to libraries, remaindered books on the cosmos from bookstores, my rooftop telescope and the Hayden Planetarium.NASA moved forward in its employee selection with time, and Tyson would serve as an advisor to America’s space agency. He looks at extraordinary claims, the Cosmos, science denial, philosophy, matters of life and death, his experience with 9/11, religious faith, school issues, and parenting. A chapter titled “Rebuttals” is reserved for special smackdowns. Some chapters are more potpourri than focused. There is a fair bit of overlap among the chapters in subject material, but not enough to negate the structure of the book. Some notions are repeated maybe a time or two too often, but that is a small blemish. Tyson, above all, defends science as the way to understand the workings of the world and the universe. And castigates those who would substitute scriptural revealed truths for the objective, testable approach science offers. His correspondents include men, women, children, prisoners, celebrities, folks of diverse political stripes and religious persuasions. He responds to scientists, teachers, athletes, and morons. All with charm, knowledge, and wisdom. The incoming letters are querulous, admiring, and sometimes hate-filled. Tyson offers some surprising observations on things like the value of IQ, the best books to read, and an actual diamond in the sky. He remembers some people he admires. There is occasional snark in his replies, but, IMHO, not nearly enough. He offers a moving message to a fan who is about to lose a dying mother, and tells how Richard Holbrooke’s interest in science informed his diplomatic work. Like Whoopi says, listening to Neil for three hours is perfectly fine, and I expect you will find the time you spend with him in the pages of this book to be just as rewarding. Not only is NDT great at what he does, which is working to educate Americans about science, he is very warm, human company, who is blessed with a gift for explaining science, and an ability to write that smooths that educational element even more. In that interview Stephen Colbert did with Whoopi, she notes that after spending time with Tyson, she remembered more, of the science things he had been talking about, than she’d expected. Maybe you will too. It most certainly won’t hurt to try. And you have any questions, you could always just send the guy a letter. Review first posted – October 4, 2019 Publication date – October 8, 2019 I received an ARC of this book from Norton in return for a review that would stand up to scientific scrutiny. =============================EXTRA STUFF Links to the author’s personal, Twitter and FB pages It would be redundant to add here the vast number of links one could use to connect with Tyson’s various activities. His primary site, at the Planetarium, offers those in abundance. But here's one anyway -----NY Times - April 17, 2021 - Neil deGrasse Tyson Thinks Science Can Reign Supreme Again by David Marchese ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Sep 13, 2019
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Sep 20, 2019
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Aug 18, 2019
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Hardcover
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1948226197
| 9781948226196
| 1948226197
| 3.67
| 4,155
| May 07, 2019
| May 07, 2019
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really liked it
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[image] Image from The Adventurists Many of the people I’ll meet on the steppe hold horses as sacred. There are more love songs about horses than a[image] Image from The Adventurists Many of the people I’ll meet on the steppe hold horses as sacred. There are more love songs about horses than about women in Mongolia—for example, ponies come last in races are sung commiseration songs because no one wants them to feel bad. Your horse is an extension of you. A Mongol without a horse is like a bird without wings—goes the proverb. Even horses’ skulls are sacred. They’re made into musical instruments, whose sounds comfort mourning souls.What has 25 legs and covers 1,000 kilometers? Why, the Mongol Derby, of course. Ring any bells? Ummm, me neither. Unless one is particularly attuned to the worlds of equestrian sports or extreme competitions we would be unlikely to have heard of it. Lara Prior-Palmer had heard of it, but had not paid much attention. The entry fee was exorbitant (about $13K US), which led her to expect that she would not be able to even think of attempting it until she was in her thirties, if then. A bored teen, a year out of high school, recently sacked from her au pair gig in Austria, her applications for other adventures producing a resounding silence, she was trolling about for her next thing, whatever might quell the inner buzz that grows louder and louder until it drowns out everything but a way forward, any way forward. She was looking on-line for something to quiet the din, when it reappeared. The passing London underground train shook the building as I leaned into the photograph—long-maned ponies streaming over green steppes, space poured wide and free—in Mongolia. The open-voweled sounds of the word matched the freedom of the country conjured in my mind. I couldn’t place Mongolia in history, nor could I place it on the map.She read on, learning that thirty riders had already signed up, that riders switch ponies every 40 Km, that the race was held in a Pony Express style that recalled Chingiss Khan’s postal system, and that it was deemed “the world’s longest and toughest horse race.” She clicked the box. [image] Lara Prior-Palmer - image from her Amazon page What are the things we might look for in a memoir of this sort? One would hope for a look at an exotic place from a perspective familiar to readers, presuming most readers to be Westerners. Given that it is a sports competition, we would hope for a look at the particulars of this race, what, if anything, sets it apart from other competitions? You’ve gotta figure that a 1,000 kilometer horse race would have to also be a journey of self-discovery, and there is at least some of that in here. Not to say that it was intended. The writing of this book began on the plane ride home to England from Ulaanbaatar, and was intended mostly as a large note-taking effort to better allow Lara to recall the event. Encouraged to expand her 25,000 words to book length by folks to whom she showed her writing, Prior-Palmer did just that, working on the manuscript, off and on, for about five years. It helps if the author can bring some talent, maybe an appreciation of beauty in her writing. [image] A Mongolian ger (yurt) - image from Phys.org Tough to get more exotic than Mongolia for most of us. And while you may be familiar with some of the weather the riders encounter, hot, cold, wind, hail, rain, you have probably not done so while engaged in a grueling horse race. Prior-Palmer fills us in on a host of local details. You will learn of the proper seating arrangements in a Mongolian ger (pronounced ‘gaire’), get a heads up on the proper behavior when encountering an ovoo, (a local shrine consisting of accumulated placed stones, and offerings), and marvel at car parts placed in trees to help gain the assistance of local deities in assuring that the subject vehicle remains in good working order. There are observations on Mongolian history and lore. One local historical figure was Molon Bagsh, an itinerant philosopher who supposedly predicted many of the wonders of the modern age from his perspective in the early 1900s. She offers a bit on the deep respect Mongolians have for their equine partners. One strand of Mongolian philosophy has it that my chest, not my brain, is the seat of my consciousness. It contains my heimori (wind-horse)—an inner creature whose power needs maintaining. When you rub a racehorse’s sweat into your forehead or ride a great, quick pony, you strengthen your heimori and improve your destiny.(You might want to towel off after that.) There are plenty more such, and they are delightful. The race itself occupies most of her consciousness. There is plenty of detail on how it is run, the accommodations, the horses, referred to here almost primarily as ponies. (BTW, to be a horse there is a height bar, 14.2 hands, or about four feet ten inches. Shorter than that, you are a pony. Mongolian equines tend to the shorter end of the bell curve.) The selection process. Which pony to choose? Based on what? Loving the ponies who were eager to fly, but having to cope with some which were far from enthusiastic. The relationships among the riders is pretty significant, particularly Lara’s relationship with an American rider, one Devan Horn, portrayed as a braggadocious Texan, certain that she will prevail. What begins as a bit of competitiveness becomes an all-consuming quest to see to it that this person is denied that victory. Her bonding, or not, with other riders, and non-riders (newspeople, veterinarians, race managers) is an ongoing subject. There are connections made or almost made during the race that highlight interpersonal challenges Lara must resolve, at least temporarily. It is difficult, and not at all necessary, to separate her coping with the race from her dealings with the locals. Riders often stay in the homes of residents, and Lara recalls some charming, as well as clueless interactions. [image] Ponies in waiting - image from The Adventurists Bear in mind that Lara was barely 19 years old when she undertook this adventure. Her age is certainly a factor in her degree of unpreparedness. While a good chunk of who we all are is well set by such an age, it takes plenty more years for the rest of the permanent us to form. What we see here is Lara as a work-in-progress. One element that manifests stronglyis the sort of stiff-upper-lip found in explorers and adventurers. I suppose we think of pain as associated with an event—an accident, for example. We don’t imagine it going on forever. I found no space for pain and its expression in daily life.She is also someone uncomfortable around public feelings. I shiver a little, relieved to be away from Clare. [a rider with whom Lara had spent some time during the competition] I find emotions contagious, swear I can catch them like flu. I’ve always been wary of upset and sickness. Aged seven, I dubbed people crybabies as though it were a life sentence and I winced in repulsion if someone missed school for sickness. I refused to let such a thing happen to me. Although later on I used sickness to save me from school, I still had no empathy for the unwell and the upset. Why would I try to imagine how Clare feels when I’m appalled she’s displayed the emotional hold the Derby has on her. Such is the strangeness of my selfishness.We get some background on family influences that fed her drive. Her Aunt Lucinda was an Olympian, having competed in equestrian events. Her favorite, no nonsense, phrase for just get on with it being “Crack On!” Her grandfather, a military general, was fond of “Just do it.” Firmed up for competition and adventure by such, she was much less able to cope with more emotional challenges. …my real fears aren’t the broken bones or the missing ponies. My real fears are long-term affairs like school, marriage, and jobs. Anything requiring a commitment longer than a ten-day race. Maybe because millions of people manage these commitments, they go unnoticed. Ordinary jobs and relationships—spread over humdrum time—are rarely thought of as brave or strong.And therein, among other such contemplations, is where we find some of the distance that Lara travels personally. Over the course of the book we see some development that maybe Lara herself does not quite perceive. Learning to see things from someone else’s perspective, learning to consider other ways to value things and actions. Her sense of not quite knowing who she is persists. It’s just I haven’t decided if I’m woodland-wild or fireside-tame, and probably never will. But she has certainly gained in building on the self-reflective muscle she finds inside. [image] Lara accepting a congratulatory call after her victory – Devan Horn in the background will have to wait for another chance-image from CNN A pointed element of self-realization is her change from seeing the race as an adventure, hoping mostly just to finish, to feeling the fire of competitiveness that was there all along, and not just to be able to stick it to Devan. There certainly must have been some part of Lara that chose a competitive adventure over the many others that the world offers. And she becomes more aware of that part of herself. She grew up in a culture that scorns overt ambition, and public presentations of self-confidence, so there was plenty of reason for her to suppress or hide her very real competitiveness. We read of sporting victories in the newspapers, but what about all we cannot see? It’s easy to forget the thudded moments of hopelessness involved in a journey, one’s deepest difficulties slowly made clear.In addition to coping with some inner parts of herself undergoing a bit of examination, Prior-Palmer suffered some of the misfortunes that were visited on other contestants: bruises, dehydration, being tossed from her mount, having to get help retrieving it, becoming ill on the (for her) six-day race. And then there were self-imposed problems, being unprepared in sundry ways, like not bringing a map, not getting the recommended vaccinations, never having ridden even a one-day race, let alone one that could last ten days, or not providing for some sanitary needs. There is some contemplative poetic writing in Prior-Palmer’s memoir. Particularly when she writes of her feeling of oneness with her ponies. For two and a half hours my focus is whole. He moves fluently, and I note the quiet warmth of his company. You make no eye contact when riding, but we’re in communication, working a shared form, like shoaling fish. Horses have always been siblings to me, pressing their noses against my back and breathing out winter breath, slowly trusting. From his silence and the morning I draw something, something like strength…Instead of loneliness I feel loveliness. Everything in the hour is familiar. The pony hurries on beneath me, persuading his way into my heart. [image] Image from CNN A thread in the book consists of passages from The Tempest, one of the reading materials she brought with her, to illustrate this or that. The arrival of the storm-driven characters in Shakespeare’s final play, washed clean in a way, pops to mind as she is caught in downpour on the steppe. A passage in which Ariel sings about a sea change in the play connects with Lara feeling transformed while riding a pony she names The Lion. It is a lovely element, but still felt a bit forced. There was plenty going on without it. The book’s title is drawn from The Tempest as well, which seemed workshop-y and less than organic, at first, given that the “rough magic” referred to in the play has to do with the bard’s ability to present fiction as reality. But on further consideration, if we forget the Shakespearean bit for a moment, “Rough” certainly works as a description of the event, and “Magic” is certainly appropriate or the magical ending of the competition, and some of Lara’s perceptions. So, never mind. Since the race, Prior-Palmer, now 24, has been to University and worked on this book in fits and starts. She feels her experience gave her a better ability to consider alternate viewpoints. But she did not feel particularly changed by the race itself at the time. She remained very much who she was, an adventure-seeking, athletic, bright, articulate young woman with a world of possibilities ahead of her and a world-class achievement already in the bag. Review posted – May 31, 2019 Publication date -----May 7, 2019 - hardcover -----April 28, 2020 - Trade paperback ==========In the summer of 2019 GR reduced the allowable review size by 25%, from 20,000 to 15,000 characters. In order to accommodate the text beyond that I have moved it to the comments section directly below. [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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May 07, 2019
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May 14, 2019
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May 21, 2019
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Hardcover
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0062407317
| 9780062407313
| 0062407317
| 4.43
| 14,506
| Aug 22, 2017
| May 22, 2018
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it was amazing
| “Life’s a bitch. You’ve got to go out and kick ass.”This is the epigraph for Rabbit, and it seems particularly germane. Of course, “Life’s a bitch. You’ve got to go out and kick ass.”This is the epigraph for Rabbit, and it seems particularly germane. Of course, unspoken is the damage life does to you before you learn how to fight back. Rabbit is the nickname Patricia Williams was given as a kid, after she was seen sitting on a porch eating a carrot. The porch in question, where she lived, at her grandfather’s house/24-7-bar/distillery, was not long for this world. When a woman he was paying to have sex with his disabled son insulted him, Gramps shot her. Buh-bye residence, any form of stability, and affection of a non-toxic sort from an adult family member. It goes downhill from there. [image] Ms. Pat - image from the Washington Post – by Chris Bergin To the extent that Williams had a childhood at all, it was one Thomas Hobbes described for people bereft of society and laws, …poor, nasty, brutish, and short. She was subjected to serial sexual abuse as a pre-teen, became pregnant at thirteen, and had her second child when she was fifteen, the baby daddy a feckless, twenty-something married man who thought nothing of routinely having sex with a child. Her mother, Mildred, was an alcoholic, who offered Rabbit no affection at all. She was a woman who used a handgun to enforce her wishes at home. She was delusional, and violent, driving away the one good man who was interested in her and her kids. She managed to stay in a relationship with another man who brought the family groceries, allowing him to regularly abuse her young daughters. She enlisted her children to commit crimes. Left to her own devices at 15, when her crack-selling baby daddy (of both her children) got pinched, leaving her with no money coming in, Rabbit did what she needed to do to put food on the table, sold crack on street corners. And she made a living at that, well, until she got arrested and spent some quality time in Fulton County Jail. This is, I’ll bet, a life very unlike yours or mine. And one must wonder if, faced with the challenges of her upbringing, the barriers, some self-erected, how we might have fared. Would we have managed to make a respectable life for ourselves? Would we have made the many bad choices Williams made, as a kid forced to function as an adult? Today, Patricia Williams, under the professional stage name Ms. Pat, is a successful forty-something stand-up comedian, with a TV series, featuring her life, in development. She has raised four of her own children and plenty more whom relatives had been unable to bring up on their own. [image] Rabbit - image from WNYC.ORG What allowed her to break out while so many others remain mired in a toxic culture, many in her own family? One could say that it is making a decision and sticking to it. But many others have made such decisions, and not found the wherewithal. Is it a matter of dumb luck to run into the person who will stand by you, just when you are open to it? Some inner strength? Divine intercession? Dunno. But clearly all the above contributed. William’s tale is both a chilling and uplifting story, with considerable detail on the depravities of ghetto life, but also on the potential for hope and for goodness when caring people step in to help make things right. At the end of the book she makes a point of noting the people who came to her aid throughout her life, referring to them as “Angels.” Her stories of their impact on her are beautifully told, and incredibly moving. If her story of a remedial teacher who encourages her when others had turned a blind eye to her illiteracy, a teacher who goes incredibly beyond simple teaching to seeing Rabbit for who she is and taking concrete simple steps to nurture her, does not bring you to tears, there is something wrong with your ducts. She found similar nurturing in warm, perceptive social workers, and most of all, in the man she met, and would marry. They don’t make ‘em any better than him. Williams’s facility with language is considerable. She had a gift for defensive and offensive verbal blasting that served her well in her native environment. You do not want her sizing you up for some straight up put downs. It would hurt. That comes across in the book, but much more so in her performances. (see links below) [image] Doing Stand-up at Morty’s Joint in Indianapolis - image from WBUR.ORG – photo by Chris Begin if the Washington Post When she was a kid growing up in an Atlanta ghetto, Williams had a dream of a better life. Inspired by the TV show, she imagined having a Leave It To Beaver existence, a calm, suburban, private home, with a yard, plenty of space, and no gunfire on the street or drug dealing on the corner. She never stopped trying for that, and ultimately saw the dream become a reality. Her life there will be the basis for her show. I have included in EXTRA STUFF some links to interviews with and performances by Ms. Pat. I strongly urge you to dip in. The book totally captures her actual voice. While some will point out that Williams contributed to some dark days in American history with her involvement with drug-dealing, among other crimes, it is worth bearing in mind the context in which those behaviors arose, how old she was, and what guidance she had, or didn’t have as a child. Also, that she served time for her activities, and has made a very successful effort to turn her life around. In addition, she has paid forward the love that was given her by raising a slew of children not her own, keeping many of them from repeating the family pattern of adolescent pregnancy, drug abuse, and public dependence. She has made a life out of what could easily have been, and has been for many, a dumpster fire. Patricia Williams has taken life on, been tough and resourceful, determined and loving. Her book is a remarkable achievement that follows Maya Angelou’s advice. Rabbit kicks ass. Review posted – August 24, 2018 Publication date -----hardcover - August 22, 2017 -----paperback – May 22, 2018 =============================EXTRA STUFF Links to the author’s personal, Twitter and FB pages Items of interest -----NY Times - Q. and A. - Tell Us 5 Things About Your Book: Patricia Williams Goes From Crime to Comedy - Auguse 20, 2017 - by John Williams ----- How Ms. Pat overcame drugs, prison and abuse — and rose to comedy stardom - March 8, 2018 - by Geoff Edgers -----Video - Stand Up Comedy - Live Gotham Comedy Club – hosted by Gabe Kaplan -----Audio – Here is Ms. Pat’s appearance on Mark Maron’s WTF Podcast - from around 10:00 There are many clips to be found in the usual places ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Aug 11, 2018
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Aug 15, 2018
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Aug 11, 2018
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Paperback
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1250192455
| 9781250192455
| 1250192455
| 4.10
| 48,408
| Apr 17, 2018
| Apr 17, 2018
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it was amazing
| All bullies are largely the same. They threaten the weak to feed some insecurity that rages inside them. I know. I’ve seen it up close.James Come All bullies are largely the same. They threaten the weak to feed some insecurity that rages inside them. I know. I’ve seen it up close.James Comey is a lawyer, and in A Higher Loyalty he has presented a case to the jury of American public opinion. He lays out the steps of his interactions with Swamp Thing, from introduction to long-distance buh-bye. This is what happened, here, here, and there, on this, this, and that dates. This is what was said. This is what I understood those words to mean. And really, who are you going to believe, a public servant with a decades-long reputation for, among other things, honesty, or a feckless serial and possibly pathological liar? [image] James Comey - image from the NY Times One can argue that it was not Swamp Thing’s clear collusion with Russia that constituted Ground Zero for what would become, in effect, a large-scale impeachment inquiry. Given the spinelessness of GOP legislators and the toadying nature of most of Trump’s appointees, given the clear intention of the Trump administration to install such creatures in as many positions of power as possible, it is a distinct possibility that there might have been no Special Counsel investigation but for a single action, taken by Swamp Thing, and his childish inability to keep his lies straight. We would still have the Quisling sorts like Devin Nunes, who could be counted on to cover their boss’s and their own butt cheeks instead of doing their constitutionally defined job of overseeing the executive branch. The hyper-partisanship and cowardice of most Republicans in the federal government have made a laughing stock of our democracy across the planet. That would have been there in any case. But on May 9, 2017, after having failed to gain a personal loyalty pledge, Swamp Thing fired James Comey as the head of the FBI, with the laughable excuse that Comey had mishandled his job of investigating Hillary Clinton, which is not to say that Comey managed it well, of which more later, but that Swamp Thing had previously praised Comey’s actions as courageous. ( Those who support his dismissal by Swamp Thing will likely succumb to right-wing talking points, preposterous though they are, that Comey was a secret Hillary supporter, whose actions strove to bolster her candidacy. If you believe that, please stop reading now. Your brain has ceased functioning and nothing written here will make any sense to you. Don’t let the door hit you on your way out.) When he subsequently admitted on a nationally televised interview that his reason for doing so was “the Russia thing,” he opened the door to a world of hurt. In the absence of the Comey firing there may never have been a Special Counsel investigation into “the Russia thing,” but by so blatantly obstructing justice by firing Comey, Swamp Thing placed the target, in flashing neon, on his own back. That is the true starting point of Comey’s book. But, like most well written legal documents, there is considerable backstory, and in a very well written case, there is a central thrust. The tale told here is not just about his few months of interactions with the president. He offers pieces of his life story to let us know the kind of person he is, or at least the kind of person he wants us to see him as, the experiences that molded his character, the personal motivations that informed his adult decisions, and what he portrays as ethical choices made in challenging situations in his career. He wants us to understand that he believes he acted properly, both in doing what he did during the 2016 presidential campaign, and in refusing to do what the tainted president demanded of him. And, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, the decision will be yours. [image] Image from SusieMadrak.com Here are the charges -----Did Director Comey tell the truth when he testified that the president had pressured him to drop the case against Michael Flynn? -----Is Director Comey an egotistical prima donna who put his personal needs and perspective above the needs of the nation and his bosses? -----Did FBI Director Comey, with forethought and malice, and by choosing to break with FBI protocol, deliberately affect the 2016 presidential election in such a way as to damage the campaign of Hilary Clinton? Questions -----Does Swamp Thing really run his White House as if he were a mafia don? -----Does a guy who’s 6’8” really think he can fade into the woodwork by getting up close and personal with White House drapery that sort of matches his suit? -----Has Comey behaved in a non-partisan manner in the jobs he has held, in the decisions he made in those jobs? [image] Image from @dumptrump33 – Of course we may be raising our expectations a tad high for RM As for that central thrust thing, it is alluded to in the opening quote. Comey bloody hates bullies. He had to contend with them as a not-nearly-oversized teen. He was thrilled, when pursuing his legal career, to have an opportunity to go after some of the uber-bullies of our society, members of organized crime. He was also on the scene when one of our major political bullies, Dick Cheney, tried to wrest a signature from a man in a hospital ward, just so he could continue an expiring domestic surveillance program of questionable legality. In a way, all his life had led up to his dealings with Swamp Thing, a person who is the very personification of the coward as bully. Comey knew what he was facing when Swamp Thing was elected. He hoped to be able to avoid conflicts with him, and see out his ten-year term as FBI head. He knew the odds of that happening were small. We are offered a look into Comey’s upbringing in Yonkers, and then New Jersey. Being an outsider, being picked on, was very painful, but in hindsight it made me a better judge of people. In my life, I would spend a lot of time assessing threats, judging tone of voice, and figuring out the shifting dynamic in a hallway or locker room crowd. Surviving a bully requires constant learning and adaptation. Which is why bullies are so powerful, because it’s so much easier to be a follower, to go with the crowd, to just blend in.He walks us through some of his career steps and big moments. These include the successful prosecution of a large chunk of the New York area mafia, prosecuting Martha Stewart, prosecuting Scooter Libby, and the event that made his reputation. He was the acting Attorney General at a time when the Stellar Wind program, an illegal domestic spying undertaking, according to DoJ analysis, was up for renewal. The administration needed a sign-off by the AG, and acting AG Comey refused. Getting wind that Presidential counsel Alberto Gonzalez and Chief of Staff Andy Card were on their way to the hospital to wrest a signature from the barely conscious John Ashcroft, being treated for a life-threatening condition, he dashed to the hospital himself, sirens howling and lights flashing, calling Robert Mueller, then the head of the FBI, to join him in preventing this blatant malfeasance. It is the stuff of legend. And secured him a place in the pantheon of political heroes for his courage under such withering political fire. The passage could have been written by any of today’s best-selling writers of political thrillers, leaving one breathless, even though we know the outcome. Though the broad strokes are at least somewhat familiar to folks who pay attention to the news, there are details I bet you do not know and will be very surprised to learn. The book is worth it just for that section alone. [image] Attorney General John Ashcroft - image from US News Throughout, Comey talks about trying to do the right, the moral, the ethical thing when confronted with difficult decisions. He is certainly persuasive when he writes about the lessons he has learned over his life from people he has known and respected, and from important people and writers whose work has informed his growth as an ethical person. He cites as a particular influence the writings of religious philosopher Reinhold Nieburh, someone many in government, from both parties, have looked to for inspiration. You may be surprised at some of the other people he notes as influencers. Also a bit of a surprise is his take on various people he has been connected to, most of whom will be familiar. Rudy Giuliani, who had held the US Attorney position for the Southern District of New York when Comey was a prosecutor there, comes in for a look. Though Giuliani’s confidence was exciting, it fed an imperial style that severely narrowed the circle of people with whom he interacted, something I didn’t realize was dangerous until much later: a leader needs the truth, but an emperor does not consistently hear it from his underlings. Rudy’s demeanor left a trail of resentment among the dozens of federal judges in Manhattan, many of whom had worked in that U.S. Attorney’s office. They thought he made the office about one person, himself, and used publicity about his cases as a way to foster his political ambitions rather than doing justice. It was a resentment that was still palpable when I became the chief federal prosecutor in Manhattan—and sat in Giuliani’s chair—a dozen years later.Hizzoner’s fondness for the limelight has not faded a single watt. Comey also talks about his dealing with former AGs and others in government. His meetings with President Obama make for fascinating and surprising reading. As with anyone who is presenting himself as ethical, and better than the pack in that regard, he offers up some specifics of errors he has made, including one fairly meaningless lie that he told as a young man, which made him feel particularly guilty. He points out an error of insensitivity he had made when addressing the Michael Brown case, but it is presented in such a way as to show how receptive he is to learning something new. It’s a bit like a job interview when the applicant tries to skirt the “What’s your worst quality?” question with how he works too hard for his own good. Eye roll please. Comey offers fleeting mea culpas on having an outsized ego and an eye for the dramatic, then notes several examples of what a wonderful, thoughtful boss he is. It is clear that he wants us to like, and respect him, and take his “aw, shucks,” demeanor at face value. But it is also quite clear that he is a well-armed, and well armored political in-fighter, familiar with his home turf, sharp-edged, and deft in the art of manipulation. It is a clear thread throughout Comey’s book that his literary RPG is locked, loaded, and aimed at one Donald J. Trump. The things that disgusted him throughout his life, from childhood and in his public career are epitomized by the man who fired him for doing his job. A secondary, related, core is centered on defending his actions in 2016 and 2017, making the case that he should not have been sacked. So what about the charges and questions? I’m almost there. But before that, you should know that James Comey, whatever you think of him as a public official or as a political person, is a wonderful writer. He is able to paint a picture and bring you along with him with seeming effortlessness. No doubt this talent has been honed by his many years of preparing and presenting cases. This book is his case to all of us. Ok, down to the end -----Does Swamp Thing really run his White House as if he were a mafia don? Really? Have you heard anything to offer a more accurate description? I haven’t. Spot on, JC, particularly given his familiarity with less powerful dons as a prosecutor in the SDNY. -----Does a guy who’s 6’8” really think he can fade into the woodwork by getting up close and personal with White House drapery that matches his suit? Yeah, he kinda thought he could. The drapery is taller than he is and the color matched his suit somewhat. [image] Darth on Twitter had a bit of fun with this [image] As you can see from this image from War News Blogspot, Comey was sure to be spotted -----Has Comey behaved in a non-partisan manner in the jobs he has held, in the decisions he made in those jobs? As for being non-partisan, I call BS on that. Comey is a Republican, and, while there have been notable instances in which he has risen above purely partisan perspectives, that bias has, I believe, interfered with his ability to remain consistently above the political fray. He writes, for example, I wanted to find a way to help Bush. This man, whom I liked and wanted to see succeed, appeared not to realize the storm that was coming. The entire Justice Department leadership was going to quit, and just as he was running for reelection.A politically disinterested official would have given such a concern zero consideration. We all bear responsibility for the deeply flawed choices put before voters during the 2016 election…Rather a false equivalence, no? It is pretty obvious how flawed the Republican candidate was, but the Democratic nominee was one of the most qualified presidential candidates in modern history. The deep flaws some insist on seeing were primarily made up of lies that had been broadcast about her for decades by a well-financed and relentless political attack machine. Like one of those augmented reality games that let you superimpose imaginary characters onto a real-world scene. (Pokémon GOP?) So BS on that, too. Opting to go public with a re-opening of the investigation of Hillary so late in the election season, against protocol, and without the prior knowledge of his AG, knowing it would likely impact the election, while simultaneously keeping under wraps the ongoing investigation of Trump for collusion with Russia was really the kicker. I believe this revealed his partisan stripes, however well he may have tried to disguise them in the tall grass of self-justification. Many will find his explanation persuasive. I am not among them. Bias revealed. -----Did Director Comey tell the truth when he testified that the president had pressured him to drop the case against Michael Flynn? Here is piece of how he describes that interaction He then said, “I hope you can see your way clear to letting this go, to letting Flynn go. He is a good guy. I hope you can let this go.”The preponderance of news coverage, confirmed by Comey’s reporting here, makes it abundantly clear that Swamp Thing did indeed ask for special treatment for his guy, a glaringly illegal no-no. Comey was right to continue with business as usual after getting this appalling directive, which is exactly what it was. -----Is Director Comey an egotistical prima donna who put his personal needs and perspective above the needs of the nation and his bosses? IMHO, Yes, but with significant asterisks. Even Comey’s close friends acknowledge that his great strength is also his great weakness: a belief in his own integrity. “He believes this in a way that creates big blind spots, because he substitutes his judgment for the rules,” says Matt Miller, a former director of public affairs for the D.O.J. - from the Vanity Fair ArticleSee more on this below. -----Did FBI Director Comey, with forethought and malice, and by choosing to break with FBI protocol, deliberately affect the 2016 presidential election in such a way as to damage the campaign of Hillary Clinton? Yes and No. It seems to me that Comey’s identification with the departments to which he has belonged or which he has headed, whether temporarily or long-term, is extremely strong. Not a bad thing, per se. But I believe there have been times when he has proven himself unable to separate where James Comey ended and the FBI or the Department of Justice began, leading to situations where Le département est moi. I believe that in some of his actions, Comey, knowingly or unknowingly, became, in his head, one with the department. Therefore, it is impossible to differentiate where actions intended to protect the reputation of the FBI or the Department of Justice leave off and become actions to defend the ego and reputation of James Comey. And there is a considerable ego involved. I would not be surprised if Comey, at some not necessarily conscious level, saw himself as a sacrificial figure, a Prometheus who gave the nation the fire of just cause to investigate Trump’s Russia dealings, or even a Christ-figure, sacrificed, if perhaps not as intentionally as the original, for the greater good. ==========In the summer of 2019 GR reduced the allowable review size by 25%, from 20,000 to 15,000 characters. In order to accommodate the text beyond that I moved it to the comments section directly below. Then in 2021 GR further reduced our capacity for including external links in comments making it a challenge to update reviews posted before then. So for the rest of the review, updated June 2, 2022, and EXTRA STUFF, please head over to my site, Coot’s Reviews. Review first posted – May 11, 2018 Publication date – April 17, 2018 ...more |
Notes are private!
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Apr 19, 2018
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it was amazing
| The end of the road was always just out of sight. Cracked asphalt deepened into night beyond the reach of our headlamps, the thin beams swallowed The end of the road was always just out of sight. Cracked asphalt deepened into night beyond the reach of our headlamps, the thin beams swallowed by the blackness that receded before us no matter how fast we biked. Light was a kind of pavement thrown down in front of our wheels, and the road went on and on. If you ever reach the end, I remember thinking, I’ll fly off the rim of the world. I pedaled harder.Some lights shine brighter. The sky is full of stars, all with their distinct glow, color, and twinkle. But there can be no denying that, as breathtaking as are all the lights we can see after sunset, some call your attention at least a bit more. There are some on which you fixate. Kate Harris is one of those. She burns radiantly with obvious intellectual brilliance, which combines with a broad knowledge of science and humanities, glows with an impressive poetic gift for descriptive language, and is possessed of an incredible store of determination. [image] Lands of Lost Borders is Kate Harris’s telling of a bike trip she took with her from-pre-teen-years bff Melissa Yule. Nothing much, really, just a leisurely jaunt across the Silk Road. Be home in time for dinner, dear. Ten months and ten thousand biking kilometers later, they were. Actually, the journey was broken up into two trips, (so, back in time for lunch?) and took over a year in total. This book focuses on the longer chunk of their ride. I wanted to bike the Silk Road as an extension of my thesis at Oxford: to study how borders make and break what is wild in the world, from mountain ranges to people’s minds, and how science, or more specifically wilderness conservation, might bridge those divides.There is drive and then there is DRIVE!!! Most of us have it in modest quantities, sometimes in spikes, sometimes it barely registers. Mine has been of the spike sort. Finding, on occasion, a target, something that fills or I thought would fill a need, I found the wherewithal to make it happen. One, when I was still a teen, was tracking down a young lass I had seen at a frat party. Another was finding a study abroad program when I was tending to a broken heart, and was looking to heal somewhere far away, a third was plotting a cross country trip in an old Postal truck with a small group of peers. Not exactly riding the Silk Road, but maybe a small taste of the joys to be had when what has been dreamt of crosses the border into reality. Of course, once across that frontier, the new land in which one finds oneself may or may not be what one had imagined. But getting from here to there, setting and accomplishing a goal is a glorious experience. One that I expect all of us have had, to one degree or another. And hopefully one that we all nurture and renew at least somewhat through the course of our lives. There are some people, however, who set their sights slightly higher, sometimes beyond the bell curve, outside the box, off the beaten path. [image] Happiness is a red Hilleberg tent pitched among snowy mountains - Image from Harris’s FB pix The higher we climbed onto the Tibetan Plateau, the better I could breathe. I felt a strange lightness in my legs, an elation of sorts. Each revolution of the pedals took me closer to the stars than I’d ever propelled myself, not that I could see them by day, when the sky was blue and changeless but for a late-morning drift of clouds. The shadows they cast dappled the slopes of mountains like the bottom of a clear stream, so that climbing the pass felt like swimming up towards the surface of something, a threshold or a change of state. Earth to sky, China to Tibet.Harris writes of her early upbringing, hanging with her brothers, moving several times, particularly enjoying remote places. It did not take long for her to set her sights beyond the horizon, well, beyond the planet, actually. She had decided as a teen that she wanted to go to Mars, under the impression that all of her home planet had already been pretty much explored. She gained some notice from the Mars Society after she sent a letter to dozens of world leaders urging them to support a manned (womaned?) mission to the Red Planet. She went on a few Outward Bound adventures, and translated her particular gift for grant writing into third-party funding for projects of various sorts across the world. Toss in an early passion for biology as well. [image] Melissa Yule and Kate Harris - image from Explore-mag.com Harris and Yule had been teaming up for sundry adventures since they were classmates as pre-teens. Science fair projects eventually gave way to other pursuits. They ran in the NYC marathon, on a whim, according to their bios in CyclingSilk.com. Who does that? These two, apparently. They also biked across the USA in 2005 and rode bikes across Tibet and Xinjiang in 2006. (the earlier piece of the Silk Road trip.) I guess they were just getting warmed up. In 2011, three Masters degrees between them later, Harris’s from Oxford and MIT, they combined their endurance-athlete inclinations, a permanent desire for adventure, and an interest in protecting imperiled landscapes and ways of life to try to ride the entire Silk Road, or at least as much as was possible, beyond what they had already ridden. Some borders are real, though, defended by people with guns, and require one to set off in an unplanned direction. So, there were interludes that had them on trucks, buses, trains, and planes. Longing on a large scale,” says novelist Don DeLillo, “is what makes history.” And longing on a smaller scale is what sends explorers into the unknown, where the first thing they do, typically, is draw a map.There are passages throughout the book on nature conservation, and the irrelevance of political borders to biological realities, but I got the feeling that this was far secondary to the ecstasy of adventuring. It seemed to me that Kate’s prodigious talent at writing grant applications, and no doubt Mel’s as well, had secured necessary funding (a $10K grant, plus considerable other support) for their odyssey, but reporting on conservation along the ride, while constituting the labor required to justify the grant, was something less than a passion. ( I was smitten with wildness, and only incidentally with science.) Of course, it could be that Harris and Yule’s reports back to their sponsors on the more scientific details of the pair’s extended field trip was the channel for most of that material. This book focuses on the adventure of exploration and, remaining true to the title, a consideration of borders, literal and figurative. [image] From Harris’s Facebook pages The more I learned about the South Caucasus, with its closed borders and warring enclaves, the more the place seemed like a playground game of capture-the-flag turned vicious, all in the dubious name of nationalism. And yet political fortunes, while sometimes solid as brick, are finally only as strong as shared belief.Harris provides spot-by-spot descriptions of the places through which they travel. She notes the sorts of things you would expect, the landscape, the architecture, the weather, the physical conditions of the area, the traffic, the colors and textures, the friendliness (or not) of the locals and the pair’s interactions with them. The history of the places they traverse comes in for a bit of a look. The origins of the word “Tibet,” for example, a consideration of whether Marco Polo actually traveled as far as he claimed, and disappointment that his motivation was solely mercantile and not exploratory. One source of inspiration was an intrepid female explorer from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Fanny Bullock Workman, a mountaineer and explorer also fond of the bicycle. this particular stretch of salt and wind, nearly uninhabited and widely dismissed as a wasteland, is one of the most contested territories in Asia. Tibetan by cultural heritage, Indian by treaty claim, and Chinese by possession, the Aksai Chin is caught in this territorial tug-of-war owing to its strategic location between nations. It all began when China furtively build a road across it in 1957, the very dirt track we were on, roping like a slow-burning fuse for more than 1,600 kilometres over the emptiness of the plateau. India only clued in to Highway 219’s existence half a decade later, and their discovery detonated a war over the borderland.[image] image from NatureNeedsHalf.org She fills us in on some of the logistical challenges involved, the hurdles to be jumped in getting the correct papers to cross from here to there, the difficulty of communicating when there is no common language, the struggle to find food, water and shelter, replacements for lost or broken pieces of this or that. One surprise was the absence of any reports of serious sexual predation, although she does report on the need to move quickly at times to evade potential unpleasantness. There are several reports of wonderful, warm experiences, as locals take the pair under their wings for a meal and a warm place to sleep. They are even joined for a time by a stray dog, and are swarmed by a herd of Tibetan antelope. Anyone can recognize wildness on the Tibetan Plateau; the challenge is perceiving it in a roadside picnic area in Azerbaijan.Harris’s telling is not just the travelogue of seeing this, then that, but includes ongoing philosophical meanderings, about her own experiences and the wider human variety, about not only the political borders with which people must contend, but personal edges, where they begin and end, or don’t. Her intellectual explorations are bolstered by a rich trove of quotes from literary classics, both prose and poetry, and from some of the authors you would expect, like Thoreau and Muir, Wallace, Darwin, and Carl Sagan. But finally, it is Harris’s gift for language that elevates this book to Himalayan heights. Combining intellectual heft with an inquiring mind is amazing enough, but to be able to communicate both the inner and outer journeys with such sensitivity and beauty is a rare accomplishment indeed. After being on an achievement bender most of my life, the prospect of withdrawal, of doing anything without external approval, or better yet acclamation, kept me obediently between the lines I couldn’t even recognize as lines. Isn’t that the final, most forceful triumph of borders? They make us accept as real and substantial what we can’t actually see?[image] image from NatureNeedsHalf.org I would not want you get through this review without at least a few roadblocks. I really wanted for each chapter to include a map of the travels contained therein. There is a map provide at the beginning, but chapter-by-chapter additions would have been most welcome. I would have liked a bit more science in the book, even if it added a fair number of pages to the total. A quibble. I wonder, though, if Harris was aware of the issues faced by Fanny Bullock Workman, who also wrote of her travels, having greater popular success with work that focused more on the travel than the scientific findings. Whether buttressed with dirt roads or red tape, barbed wire or bribes, the various walls of the world have one aspect in common: they all posture as righteous and necessary parts of the landscape.This is not your summer trip to Europe. You will not be familiar with most of the places these two riders visit. The larger entities, sure, country names, some mountain ranges, but most of the local place names will be unfamiliar. Part of the fun of reading this book is that it sends you off on a journey of discovery of your own, looking up this town, that river, or an unheard-of plain or valley. In this, the book very much succeeds in sparking a bit of the exploratory impulse in most readers. You may or may not want to schedule a trip to many of the places she notes, but you will definitely want to learn more about them. The true risks of travel are disappointment and transformation: the fear you’ll be the same person when you go home, and the fear you won’t. Then there’s the fear, particularly acute on roads in India, that you won’t make it home at all.[image] image from Explore Magazine – shot by Kate Harris It may be grueling, surprising, filled with up and downs, demoralizing, exhilarating, exciting, stunningly beautiful, and rich with landscape, exterior and interior. Lands of Lost Borders may not wear out your arms or legs, your back, or any other muscle group, (ok, maybe the muscles that control your eyes) but it will stimulate your mind, lift up your spirit, and stimulate your need to pedal through darkness into knowing. Lands of Lost Borders is a stunning literary memoir you will not soon forget. Exploration, more than anything, is like falling in love: the experience feels singular, unprecedented, and revolutionary, despite the fact that others have been there before. No one can fall in love for you, just as no one can bike the Silk Road or walk on the moon for you. The most powerful experiences aren’t amenable to maps. Review posted – April 6, 2018 Publication date – August 21, 2018 =============================EXTRA STUFF Links to the author’s personal, Twitter and FB pages Melissa Yule’s Twitter page. Yule holds a Master’s degree in International Development from the University of Guelph. Her interests include community development and environmental science. Here is her profile on the CyclingSilk.com site. There is a lot of information available at Cycling Silk. I strongly advise you to check out the site. A brief (11:43) video of their trip In case you missed the link in the body of the review, it is worth checking out Fanny Bullock Workman, one of Harris’s heroes. The Golden Record – it was sent on the Voyager mission to let far-away civilizations know we are here. Harris talks about it a fair bit at one point in the book [image] What’s on it - image from Wiki The Harper Book Queen included a bit on this book in her TBR Tuesdays FB live broadcast from 8/21/18 - at 11:47 Interviews -----The Globe and Mail - In a tiny B.C. cabin, Kate Harris penned tales of travel along the Silk Road - by Marsha Lederman - 2/15/18 -----Explore Magazine - The Way of the Wolf: Lands of Lost Borders, With Author Kate Harris What was the hardest part of the journey?[image] The Harris Mansion - image from the Globe and Mail article 400 sq ft of paradise in Atlin, B.C. suits the author just fine. Not surprising that she is comfy in what most of us might consider roughing-it quarters. She is a descendant of William Clark, of Lewis and Clark fame. Sorry, I could not help it. There were just so many quotes from the book that I wanted to use. But it was not possible to fit them all in. So off we go to EXTRA EXTRA STUFF right below here in Comment #1 ...more |
Notes are private!
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Mar 19, 2018
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it was amazing
| On the highway below, the school bus rolls past without stopping. I am only 7, but I understand that it is this fact more than any other that makes On the highway below, the school bus rolls past without stopping. I am only 7, but I understand that it is this fact more than any other that makes my family different. We don't go to school. Dad worries that the government will force us to go, but it can't because it doesn't know about us. Four of my parents' seven children don't have birth certificates. We have no medical records because we were born at home and have never seen a doctor or nurse. We have no school records because we've never set foot in a classroom.Educated is both a tale of hope and a record of horror. We know from the first page of her book that Tara Westover is a bright woman, a gifted writer with an impressive, poetic command of language. But her early life offered no clue that she would become a Cambridge PhD or a brilliant memoirist. She was the youngest of seven children born to Gene and Faye (not their real names) Westover, fundamentalist, survivalist Mormons, in rural Idaho. [image] Tara Westover - image from her The Times We had a farm which belonged to my grandfather, and we had a salvage yard full of crumpled-up cars which belonged to my father. And my mother was a - she was an herbalist and a midwife. And as children, we spent a lot of hours walking on the mountain, gathering rose hips and mullein flowers that she could stew into tinctures. So in a lot of ways, it was a very beautiful childhood. - from NPR interviewThe children constituted his workforce in Gene’s scrapyard. Father was the law in their household, but it was a rule informed as much by significant mental health issues as it was by his ardent religious beliefs. In a less rural, less patriarchal, less religious community, theirs could easily have been deemed an unsafe environment. The scrapyard was a particularly dangerous place. …he just didn't have that bone in his head that said, this is dangerous; don't do this. And he had a really hard time understanding injuries even after they had happened and how severe they were. I just - I don't know what it was about the way his mind worked. He just wasn't able to do that. - from NPR interviewRuby Ridge had occurred when Tara was five, and fed her father’s paranoia. Everyone had to have head-for-the-hills bags for when the government, Deep State, Illuminati, choose your own boogeyman, would come for them. He had a profound distrust of the medical profession, believing that doctors were agents of Satan, intent on doing harm. He saw the herbalism Faye practiced as the only true, righteous treatment for one’s ills, calling her products “god’s pharmacy.” And he practiced what he preached, for himself as well as for his children, even after suffering a devastating injury. Maybe not an ideal way to make sure your kids reach adulthood in one piece. [image] View from Buck Peak - image from Westover’s site Home schooling was also less than idyllic, with mom’s attention spread not only over seven children but to her work as an herbalist and later, in addition, a midwife. Luke had a learning disability, frustrating mom, who really had hoped to educate them all. Dad undermined this, dragging the kids out to do chores and learn practical skills. Eventually mom gave up. Education consisted of Faye dropping them at the Carnegie Library in town, where they could read whatever they wanted. Dad rustled the boys at 7am, but Tyler, who had an affinity for math, would often remain inside, studying, until dad dragged him out. …there was not a lot of school taking place. We had books, and occasionally we would be kind of sent to read them. But for example, I was the youngest child, and I never took an exam, or I never wrote an essay for my mother that she read or nothing like kind of getting everyone together and having anything like a lecture. So it was a lot more kind of if you wanted to read a book, you could, but you certainly weren't going to be made to do that. - from NPR interviewSuccessful schooling or not, Tara acquired a desire for and love of learning. Tyler, a black sheep, not only loved books but music, as well. This was a major tonic for Tara, who was smitten with the classical and choral music her brother would play on his boom box. Not only did she find a love for music, but she discovered that she has a gift for singing. Being a part (often the star) of the town musical productions gave her greater contact with peers outside her family than she had ever had before. It formed one pillar of her desire to go to school, to college, to study music. (I included a link in EXTRA STUFF to a music video in which she sings lead, so you can hear for yourself.) At age seventeen, Tara Westover attended her first school class, at BYU, clueless about much of what was common knowledge for everyone else, resulting in her asking a question in class about a word everyone, I mean everyone, knows. Oopsy. Her intellectual broadening and education forms one powerful thread in her story. How her natural curiosity emerged, was nurtured, discouraged, and ultimately triumphed. The other thread consists of the personal, emotional, psychological, religious, and cultural challenges she had to overcome to become her own person. The world in which Westover was raised was one in which a powerful patriarchy, fed by a fundamentalist religious beliefs, applied its considerable pressure to push her into what was considered the proper role for a young woman, namely homemaker, mother, probably following in her mother’s dual careers as herbalist and midwife. And what about what was the right course for Tara? There was some wiggle room. Once dad sees her perform on stage, he is smitten, and softens to her musical leanings. Male siblings had been allowed to go to college. But every step outside the expectations, the rules, came at a cost. Do something different and lose a piece of connection to your family. And family was extremely important, particularly for a person whose entire life had been defined by family, much more so than for pretty much anyone who might read her book. [image] Westover as a wee Idaho spud - image from the NY Post A piece of this proscribed existence was a tolerance for aberrant behavior. Father was domineering, and was feckless about physical danger, even as it applied to his children. And distrustful of the medical establishment. His solution for infected tonsils was to have Tara stand outside with her mouth open to allow in the sun’s healing rays. Severe injuries, including Tara having her leg punctured by razor-like scrap-metal, a brother suffering severe burns on one leg, and even dad himself suffering catastrophic third-degree burns in a junkyard explosion, were to be treated by home-brew tinctures. He was also extremely moody, a characteristic that carried forward in some of the family genes. Tara’s ten-years-older brother, Shawn, was a piece of work. She felt close to him at times. He could be kind and understanding in a way that moved her. He even saved her life in a runaway horse incident. But he had a reputation as a bar brawler, as a person eager to fight. Sometimes his rages turned on his own family. And it was not just rage, sparked by trivialities, but cruelty, to the point of sadism. Tara was one of the objects of his madness. Dare oppose him and he would twist her arm to the point of spraining, drag her by her hair, force her face into unspeakable places and demand apologies for imagined offenses. Possibly even worse than this was her family’s denial about it, even when it occurred right in front of them. It is this denial that was hardest to bear. If your own parents will betray you, will not look out for you, in the face of such blatant attacks, then what is the value of the thing you hold most dear in the world? All abuse, no matter what kind of abuse it is, foremost, an assault on the mind. Because if you’re going to abuse someone I think you have to invade their reality, in order to distort it, and you have to convince them of two things. You have to convince them that what you’re doing isn’t that bad. Which means you have to normalize it. You have to justify it, rationalize it. And the other thing you have to convince them of is that they deserve it. - from C-span interviewHer brother, aliased as “Shawn” in the book, was a master manipulator, who, for years, succeeded magnificently in persuading Tara that what she had just experienced had never really happened. One frustrating aspect of the book is Tara’s dispiriting, but also grating ability to doubt herself, to allow others in her life, bullies, to persuade her she does not think what she is thinking, that she does not feel what she is feeling that she did not see what she has seen. She was living in a gaslit world in which multiple individuals, people who supposedly loved her, were telling her that what she had seen was an illusion, and that bad things that other people did were somehow her fault. Honey, wake the hell up. How many time ya gonna let these awful people get away with this crap? That gets old well before the end. I was very much reminded of victims of domestic abuse, who convince themselves that they must have done something to cause, to deserve the violence they suffer. One can only hope that she has been able to vanquish this self-blaming propensity completely by now. Years of therapy have surely helped. [image] Tara at Cambridge - image from Salt Lake City Tribune She struggles with the yin and yang of her upbringing and finding her true self. Her father was extreme, but also loving. Her abusive brother had a very kind side to him. Her mother was supportive, but was also a betrayer. Her parents wanted what they truly thought was best for her, but ultimately attempted to extinguish the true Tara. The dichotomy in the book is gripping. At times it reads like How Green Was My Valley, an upbringing that was idyllic, rich with history and lore, both community and family, and featuring a strong bond to the land. Their home was at the foot of Buck Peak, which sported an almost magical feature that looked like an Indian Princess, and was the source of legends. At others, it is like a horror novel, a testament to the power of reality-bending, indoctrination, and maybe even Stockholm Syndrome. How she survived feeling like the alien she was in BYU and later Cambridge, is amazing, and a testament to her inner strength and intellectual gifts. Westover caught a few breaks over the course of her life, teachers, one at BYU, another at Cambridge, who spot the diamond in her rough, and help her in her educational quest. Reading of this support, I had the same weepy joyful feeling as when Hagrid informs a very young lad, “Yer a wizard, Harry.” When setting out to write the book, Westover had no clue how to go about it, well, this sort of a book, anyway. She had already written a doctoral thesis. But she did have stacks of journals she’d been keeping since she was ten. In figuring out how to get from wish to realization, one important resource was listening to the New Yorker fiction podcast, with its focus on short stories. And she took in plenty of books on writing. It is certainly clear that, just as she had the wherewithal to go from no-school to doctorate at Cambridge, she has shown an ability to figure out how to write a moving, compelling memoir. Educated is a triumph, a remarkable work, beautifully told, of the journey from an isolated, fundamentalist, survivalist childhood, through the trials of becoming, to adulthood as an erudite and accomplished survivor. It is a powerful look at the ties, benefits, and perils of families. Ultimately, Educated is a rewarding odyssey you do not want to miss. Review first posted – 3/23/18 Published – 2/20/18 November 29, 2018 - Educated is named as one of The 10 Best Books of 2018 December 2019 - Educated is named winner of the 2018 Goodreads Choice Award for memoirs, beating out Michelle Obamas's blockbuster hit, Becoming. From a GR interview with Westover Goodreads: Congratulations on your win! What does the award and all the support from Goodreads readers mean to you? [image] [image] [image] [image] =============================EXTRA STUFF Links to the author’s personal, Twitter and FB pages Although the internet yielded no vids of Tara singing lead in her town’s production of Annie in the wayback, here is one of grown-up Tara singing lead vocal on The Hills of Aran with John Meed Interviews ----- C-Span - interviewed by Susannah Cahalan – video – 1 hour – If you can manage only one of these, this is the one to see -----CBS This Morning - video – 6:41 -----Penguin promotional video – 7:01 -----Channel 4 News - 8:46 -----NPR - with Dave Davies – the link includes text of the interview. There is a link on the page to the full audio interview – 38:18 - This is the source for several quotes used in the review, and is definitely worth a look and/or listen -----GoodReads interview A sample of the audiobook, read by Julia Whelan, , on Soundcloud A brief interview with Westover and Whelan re the making of the audiobook - on Signature -----NY Times - 2/2/2022 - I Am Not Proof of the American Dream - a powerful essay by the author on the need for help to get an education - MUST READ STUFF ...more |
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Mar 07, 2018
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3.97
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it was amazing
| “There are 690,000 official DACA registrants and the president sent over what amounts to be two and a half times that number, to 1.8 million,” Kelly s “There are 690,000 official DACA registrants and the president sent over what amounts to be two and a half times that number, to 1.8 million,” Kelly said. “The difference between (690,000) and 1.8 million were the people that some would say were too afraid to sign up, others would say were too lazy to get off their asses, but they didn’t sign up.”Wouldn’t it be a wonderful thing to be able to talk about the challenges of immigration without the sort of ignorance and bigotry that is often brought to the discussion? A debate that considers cost and benefits, not just in economic, and political, but in human terms would be a significant step forward. Francisco Cantú, an Arizona native, was a college graduate with an interest in international relations, particularly border issues. He imagined a future in law or the foreign service, but thought he might be best prepared if he had first-hand experience of the border for himself. So he joined the largest police force in the country, the United States Border Patrol (BP). Although it is a police force, the BP re-imagined the agents’ uniforms in a more military style in 2007, the better to reflect what was increasingly seen as a military mission. The outdoors element of the job held particular appeal as his mom had been a National Parks ranger for many years, giving him a taste for nature, particularly the desert. [image] Francisco Cantú – image from Mother Jones – by Beowulf Sheehan Although The Line Becomes a River is divided into three parts, two of the parts live on one side of a line and the final part lives, and struggles, on another. Cantú writes of his training and early experiences in the BP, where he served as a Border Patrol Agent (BPA) for four years. Much of the work was watching and waiting, responding to tripped sensors, trying to track down those who had crossed, sometimes helping the exhausted, dehydrated, and/or injured, and sometimes finding the remains of failed crossers. Many perish in the attempt. (Don’t even think of trying to cross in the summer.) You learn about methods used by the BP to discourage migrants, and the resulting conflicts one might have about employing methods that could be life-threatening. You will get some analysis on how the increase in US crackdowns at the border has pushed the crossing economy into the hands of drug cartels. You will also learn some of the nuances of what various maimings by cartel operatives are intended to signal, pick up some information on how much of the US side of the border is used and sometimes controlled by coyotes and their employers, feel the eyes on your back as Cantú tells about the impressive cartel intelligence network in place, on both sides of the border, to manage the crossings, and see how migrants are often held for ransom by coyotes, with payments demanded of terrified relations, sometimes even when the extortionists did not have the crosser. [image] Image from Wired Magazine The third part of the book begins after Cantú has left the BP. A couple of years in, working as a barista in a local shopping center, he is friends with Jose Martinez, a fellow who does much of the cleaning there, and who shares breakfast with Cantú most days. Martinez is the most reliable, and the best worker in the place, according to the owner. Lovely wife, three kids, church-goer, attentive father, pillar-of-the-community sort. When he learns that his mother is in her last days he returns home to see her off. Problem is, mom is doing her crossing over from the more southerly territory of the great state of Mexico. And, despite his many years in the USA, despite his work ethic, despite his enviable character, Jose was, and is, an illegal immigrant, and now has to deal with cartel-organized coyotes to find his way back home, and the US border machinery once he crosses. The trials of this effort, the support Jose receives from the community, the assistance Cantú offers Jose and his family, the details of what happens when an illegal is caught, all combine to make this a very personal, educational, and moving story. [image] Banner from FC’s site Cantú adds in dashes of regional history pertaining to the establishment and marking of the border, and offers occasional writing about the often frightening beauty of the land. This is not a political screed. Cantú is attempting to look past the rhetoric to the on-the-ground details of the crossing problem. There is a cost to the BPAs, as well as to those they apprehend. Cantú’s mother worries that his soul will become deformed by containment within a government structure, that his idealism will be used by the Border Patrol in ways he might not care for. The cost to the crossers and their families is considerable, immediate, and often lifelong. [image] A view of the U.S.-Mexico border fence on the outskirts of Nogales, Mexico – image from the NPR interview Cantú intersperses his narrative with recollection of dreams he began having while in the Border Patrol. It may feel like a workshopped lit device, at first, until one learns the basis. The first sign that the job was taking a toll for me came in the form of those nightmares, of which I tried to describe a few in the book. For years I would just ignore them. Like in any enforcement or military job, part of the training is designed to normalize these intense traumatic, and often violent, experiences that you’re expected to have. In my waking life, I totally did that. I normalized the things I saw, never thought about it. I think the dreams rose up from that pushing-aside/normalizing not-normal happenings. When I started to realize that, and the reason I write about them, is that there was a recurring dream I was always having. I was wearing my teeth out, grinding the enamel off my molars. That was the first time my dream world manifested in my waking life. That was the point at which I had to pay more attention to my dreams. They were shaking me. - from the Mother Jones interview[image] A Border Patrol vehicle drives in front of a mural in Tecate, Mexico, just beyond a border structure in Tecate, Calif. – image from Nieman Storyboard - by Gregory Bull/Associated Press There are many moving moments in this book. Cantú talked with NPR’s Steve Inskeep about one woman who had been caught crossing. I remember sort of bandaging her feet and cleaning her wounds, which is this very, you know, direct, tangible way of helping someone. I think it's almost biblical, in a sense, to clean someone's feet. And I remember her looking down at me just kind of, like, very tenderly and thanking me. And I felt like, "Don't thank me. At the end of the day, I'm taking you back to a cell and I'm sending you on your way to be sent back to this place that you're literally risking your life to flee." And so, yes, it's true that the Border Patrol does good work and rescues people and saves lives, but there's tension there.There is no legislative agenda here. Francisco Cantú does not offer specific solutions to the real questions of how to regulate immigration. It is certainly clear that he is sympathetic to many he encountered, both while wearing a badge, and while pulling shots. But his sympathies, and empathies are shared with all sides. He knows what it is to be a BPA, and is sensitive to the challenges of the job, and to the toll it can take. He is aware of the physical perils police face, having to contend with cartel-based operations, and the emotional cost of constantly having to cope with desperate people. The Line Becomes a River offers a very human face to what is often a very inhuman conversation. Will it change anyone’s mind? I doubt that many who are opposed to immigration will bother reading it. The ideological barrier around fixed perspectives can be far more unbreachable than any physical wall. But for those seeking a human response to a humanitarian crisis, this would be a good place to gain a bit of perspective. [image] image from KPBS.org I'll never forget as a Border Patrol agent bringing this guy into my station, part of a group that I apprehended, and I was rolling his fingerprints and putting him into, you know, the database to be shipped back to Mexico. And I remember him just kind of like looking around while I was asking him these formulaic questions. And he's like, "Hey, I know there's a couple hours before the bus comes, is there anything that I can do? Can I take out the trash? Can I clean the cells? I want to show you that I'm here to work." Review first posted – February 9, 2018 Publication date – February 6, 2018 ==========In the summer of 2019 GR reduced the allowable review size by 25%, from 20,000 to 15,000 characters. In order to accommodate the text beyond that I have moved it to comment #1 below. [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
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Feb 2018
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Feb 06, 2018
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Feb 05, 2018
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Hardcover
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1455540412
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| 4.22
| 22,813
| May 2017
| May 30, 2017
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it was amazing
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First, I want to differentiate between what I thought of the book and what I have to say about Franken’s later travails with alleged sexual misconduct
First, I want to differentiate between what I thought of the book and what I have to say about Franken’s later travails with alleged sexual misconduct, and his resignation from the Senate. That is at the bottom of the review, in a separate section. In Giant of the Senate, Al Franken shows that not only is he a very smart, very serious student of public policy, but also that he retains the sense of humor that fueled his first career. He has been a writer for a long time. As any watcher of SNL knows, some of the entertainment pieces he wrote are wonderful, some not so much. He always had an interest in politics, and in recent years redirected his pen toward more pointed political satire. As with his less political comedic work, some of his books are more effective, informative, and entertaining than others. Thankfully, this insightful and informative autobiography is the best thing he has ever written. [image] Franken and comedy partner Tom Davis - image from the Post-Gazette In Franken’s first career as a writer and performer of comedic material, for stage, TV, and cinema, he initially paired with close friend, and school chum, Tom Davis, doing live performances. Later, they worked together on Saturday Night Live. He tells of his early days in comedy, reporting on various experiences before he made it as one of our premier comedic voices. There are some tales told of his time on SNL, not a whole lot, but enough. He writes about some of the personal challenges in his life, people close to him battling substance abuse, some losing those battles. Post SNL, he wrote several films and began writing political satire. This brought him closer to the political arena. Also, his annual trips with the USO to entertain US troops abroad gave him a taste for one-on-one interaction with regular, non-entertainment industry folks. [Insert snide Leann Tweeden-related remark here] Franken was involved with the creation of the Progressive radio network, Air America. Al had a three hour daily show and never missed a day. He and co-host Katherine Lanpher offered a combination of news reporting, interviews with politically relevant experts, and a fair bit of straight up comedy. Lampooning the George W. Bush administration was high on the agenda. Originally titled The O’Franken Factor to taunt Bill O’Reilly, it was eventually changed to the Al Franken Show. Wiki has a nice description of it. Sadly, Wiki makes no mention of a recurring bit in which Al played an old Irish lady who complained of having a “wee bit of the diarrhea.” ROFL material for me and my wife. We caught the show frequently. [image] Franken with Air America co-host Katherine Lanpher - Credit Ralph Barrera /The Austin-American Statesman, via Associated Press Helping friend and political hero Minnesota Senator Paul Wellstone in his re-election campaign gave Franken a great appreciation for the nitty gritty of political life. Unlike many in the entertainment world, he loved interacting with regular folks, and learned a lot through that experience. Enough so that when Wellstone came to a tragic end, Franken felt he had an opportunity to put his political words into action, and ran for Wellstone’s seat. [image] Franken with late Wellstone staffer Will McLaughlin and the late Senator Wellstone - from Franken’s Senate site The bulk of this book is about his experiences leading up to his decision to run, his campaign for the Senate seat, and his steep learning curve finding his way as a newbie US Senator. A good pol could give you an informative insider’s view of being a 21st century politician in the USA, but Franken leads you to laugh along with him at many of the odd and awful things (and people) he sees, without coming across as condescending, well, mostly. He really does recognize his position as a relative rookie and seeks to learn the ropes with all due humility, even eating crow to Mitch McConnell when he transgressed, and knew it. One of the toughest challenges Franken faced was learning to put a cork in it when he felt compelled to say something funny. Imagine a Senatorial staff attempting to intercept joke-laden speeches with the same panic faced by the Trump staff, at least those who do not reek of brimstone, attempting to keep Swamp Thing from exceeding his daily allowance of racist, homophobic, xenophobic, ignorant, insulting, and counterproductive tweets. Ok, maybe a bit less panic, but the same general condition applies, attempting to stem natural urges in a place where giving in to such impulses can often be very costly. Many of these descriptions are LOL funny. He writes with some passion about the Republican DeHumorizor machine, it’s talent for taking words out of context, and making them appear to mean the exact opposite of what was intended. It was one of the heaviest burdens he faced, having to keep his sharpest tool in the shed for so much of the time. You could do a lot worse, looking to learn how the Senate actually works, than to check out Franken’s you-are-there descriptions. He writes a fair bit about instances in which he was able to actually get some good things done, working with members of that other party. It gives one hope, however slim since Newt Gingrich declared war on civility, that some sense of decorum and decency remains in the Senate halls. There is much more in the book, which is not only a highly informative read, but is very entertaining. His descriptions of Ted Cruz and the reactions the ego-bloated and insufferable Cruz evokes from other senators is, alone, worth the price of the book. Whatever one’s political bent, there is good information to be had in Giant of the Senate, and he will make you laugh. Can’t ask for much more than that. Except… =========================THE RESIGNATION Republicans do not have to do all that much to defeat Democrats in the 2018 mid-term and 2020 national elections. The Democratic Party will do their work for them. [image] Al Franken resigns - image from DailySignal.com All crimes are not equal, however much the Purity Posse pretends they are. It is possible to be a schmuck without being a serial and unreconstructed predator, and those two different sorts should be treated very differently. Should Senator Franken have been driven from the Senate for his actions? I do not believe so. The claims brought against him were far from firm, came from sources who were not always willing to be named, many, and possibly all of whom are allied with the Republican Party. Unlike the case with defeated Alabama Senatorial candidate Roy Moore, whose crimes are an entirely other order of business and whose accusers have no political axes to grind, or the case with a president who has boasted on tape of serial assault, there is considerable room for doubt concerning the charges being made about Senator Franken. It seems clear to me that the current wave of outrage about sexual misconduct, justified though it is, will be weaponized and used to diminish the only party whose members are capable of feeling actual shame. You can expect more Democrats to be accused of such misconduct, and I would not be surprised if many of those claims were lies. People who claim misconduct, particularly those who go on the record, should definitely have their accusations taken seriously. Those claims should be investigated, with all due professionalism and speed. But unless we are eager to return to the dark days of seventeenth century Salem, it would be prudent to consider that not all claims of misconduct are necessarily based in fact. And given the right-wing’s fondness for planting false information to affect our democratic processes, the accused, this side of a confession, or a very strong preponderance of evidence, particularly in the political sphere, should be given the benefit of the doubt until proper investigations can be completed. In fact, as I wrote the beginning of this paragraph, the right had already begun, lying about Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, according to this December 13, 2017 article in the Washington Post - False accusations against Schumer were the latest attempt to trick the media. Schumer’s lack of support for Franken, by the way, was not surprising, given that he had opposed his run for Senate in the first place. More recently, GOP fabrications about NJ Democratic Congressman Tom Malinowski continued the all-lies-all-the-time GOP brand - False G.O.P. Ad Prompts QAnon Death Threats Against a Democratic Congressman. Tactically, the Democratic purists effectively vacated a Senate seat that was won with the smallest margin in national history, a seat that was given to a person who, although she later revised her position, initially promised not to run for election in 2020. Thankfully, she won. Please remember that it was Al Franken’s tough challenging of Jeff Sessions in Judiciary Committee hearings that led to Sessions recusing himself from playing any part in the Russia investigation, which was not nothing. [image] Franken questions Sessions in Judiciary committee hearings - image from c-span So, while the purists are patting themselves on the back about what wonderful people they are, they put the entire nation at risk of accelerating the demolition of democracy that the GOP has foisted on us all. While they were busy urging voters to support them as protectors of women, Republican voters continued to support people dedicated to stripping away social programs like Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and countless smaller programs that women rely on to survive. 63% of WHITE WOMEN in Alabama voted for a pedophile rather than a Democrat. 80% of white Christians voted for the Brimstone Cowboy. At what point did the Grand Old Party stop being a political entity and take on the characteristics of a cult? Republican voters consistently vote to retain or install Senators and Representatives who will take away their reproductive rights, and pack the Supreme Court with extremist ideologues and partisan hacks who will ensure at least another generation of anti-democratic, pro-business bias on the court, and who, given time, will criminalize abortion once again. (Something all-but guaranteed, given Trump's SCOTUS nominations, and McConnell's refusal to bring up Obama's nominee for a vote) That is, when they take a break from looting the resources of every middle and working class person in the nation to stuff even more money into the pockets of the already rich, and doing their level best to ensure that there is no habitable world left for our children and grandchildren to inherit. Politics has been called the art of the possible, not the art of the perfect. If you want to be holier than thou, join a monastery. I want my representatives to be well grounded in the real world. I am not looking for perfection. And if they behave badly, that behavior should be publicized, criticized, addressed, and, where called for, prosecuted. You don’t execute people for shoplifting, and you should not kill a very positive political career for behavior that merits a much lesser punishment. I am hardly alone in that opinion. Zephyr Teachout, a New York progressive who ran for governor in 2014, feels the same way. Here is her December 11, 2017 NY Times Op-ed on her reasoning, I’m Not Convinced Franken Should Quit. There are plenty more who share our view. I strongly urge you to read Emily Yoffe’s article in Politico, Why the #MeToo Movement Should Be Ready for a Backlash, and Andrew Sullivan's January 12, 2018 piece in New York Magazine It’s Time to Resist the Excesses of #MeToo. Al Franken, based on publicly information available, did not deserve to be pushed out of the Senate. Censured? Definitely. Publicly excoriated for being a boor and a schmuck? You bet. But we were all put in danger of losing his very important votes on women’s, foreign policy, and other substantive issues just so some pols could preen their perfect feathers, (and establish presidential campaigns) while putting everyone else, and the very notion of due process at risk. Thanks a lot. Review first Posted - 12/15/17 Publication date - 5/30/2017 =============================EXTRA STUFF Did not seem much point to putting up links to Franken’s Senate-based sites. His Twitter page seems to still be live. Other Al Franken Books -----The Truth with Jokes -----Lies & the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair & Balanced Look at the Right -----Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot OTHER -----One answer to a question raised in the Resignation section above appeared in the December 15, 2017 Sunday New York Times, in the form of an opinion piece by Amy Sullivan. It is definitely worth checking out - America’s New Religion: Fox Evangelicalism -----March 26, 2019 - The Atlantic - Democrats Need to Learn From Their Al Franken Mistake - Emily Yoffe's latest take on the implications of Franken's takedown -----July 22, 2019 - New Yorker Magazine - The Case of Al Franken - by Jane Mayer- an excellent piece on Franken and the accusations against him. ...more |
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3.61
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it was amazing
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Jan 08, 2024
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Jan 11, 2024
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4.31
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it was amazing
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Sep 30, 2023
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Oct 03, 2023
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3.61
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it was amazing
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Mar 07, 2023
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Mar 06, 2023
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4.04
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really liked it
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Feb 20, 2022
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Feb 22, 2022
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4.09
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it was amazing
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Dec 27, 2021
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Dec 27, 2021
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3.21
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really liked it
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Sep 18, 2021
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Sep 18, 2021
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4.06
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really liked it
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May 08, 2021
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May 17, 2021
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3.66
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really liked it
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Feb 22, 2021
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Mar 03, 2021
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4.14
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it was amazing
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Feb 10, 2021
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Jan 13, 2021
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4.17
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it was amazing
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Nov 06, 2020
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Oct 02, 2020
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3.82
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it was amazing
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Sep 05, 2020
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Sep 05, 2020
|
||||||
4.29
|
it was amazing
|
Apr 25, 2020
|
Feb 07, 2020
|
||||||
4.06
|
it was amazing
|
Sep 20, 2019
|
Aug 18, 2019
|
||||||
3.67
|
really liked it
|
May 14, 2019
|
May 21, 2019
|
||||||
4.43
|
it was amazing
|
Aug 15, 2018
|
Aug 11, 2018
|
||||||
4.10
|
it was amazing
|
Apr 28, 2018
|
Apr 28, 2018
|
||||||
3.88
|
it was amazing
|
Mar 29, 2018
|
Mar 29, 2018
|
||||||
4.47
|
it was amazing
|
Mar 18, 2018
|
Mar 18, 2018
|
||||||
3.97
|
it was amazing
|
Feb 06, 2018
|
Feb 05, 2018
|
||||||
4.22
|
it was amazing
|
Nov 30, 2017
|
Aug 31, 2017
|